The Sixth Estate

This week yet another Conservative politician slipped through the nets of the “independent” Commissioners whose job it is to lend a pretense of accountability to the Harper regime. This time the guilty part is former Newfoundland Cabinet minister turned federal “fisheries ambassador” turned Conservative candidate turned Ocean Choice International executive Loyola Sullivan.

Sullivan has had an accomplished career. He was a Progressive Conservative member, briefly leader, and later Cabinet minister in Newfoundland. He retired in 2006 and was quickly snapped up by the federal Conservatives as a “Fisheries Ambassador.” Sullivan worked in that portfolio for a few more years, and then stepped down in early 2011 so that he could run for the federal Conservatives as their candidate in St. John’s South, where he was roundly drubbed by the NDP. Then shortly after the election defeat, he found a new job, this one in the private sector, as an executive at the Ocean Choice fisheries giant. One problem: apparently contrary to assurances he gave the Ethics Commissioner at the time of his hiring, that job involved organizing lobbying efforts against the federal government.

This is where the story begins to get complicated. What do you call the opposite of a catch-22 situation? What I mean is, a situation in which due process is rigged so that youwin either way?

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The media is understandably perturbed that Stephen Harper’s deputy chief of staff, Derek Vanstone, has been hired as a new executive and lobbyist by Air Canada. Vanstone and Air Canada will be using a loophole in the current lobbying regulations to get around a legal requirement that senior political staffers wait five years before becoming lobbyists. There are many such loopholes in the legislation, but the one they will use, I expect, is the one that says that anyone who spends less than 20% of their paid time meeting with government isn’t a “real” lobbyist and therefore doesn’t have to wait five years.

However, what you may not take away from reading about the Vanstone affair in the news media is that this is precisely the way this government works. Why would we expect an apology, or an ethics inquiry, or anything of that sort, when this is standard operating procedure for the Harper regime?

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A couple people have written me recently, and one has commented, asking me whether I know much about the entry into Canada of private prison contractor GEO Group, on a mission to soak up government funding running the public prisons that the Harper regime is currently shutting down. I’m afraid I don’t. I could launch into a long rant about the stupidity of public-private partnerships, but you could get that from any number of authors.

What I do know a little about, though, is GEO Group’s lobbyist, and that fits more into the themes of this blog, so I’ll comment on that today, instead. In Ottawa, there are dozens of lobbying firms, ranging from tiny outfits with a couple of high-profile former staffers and a few people just out of public policy school, all the way up to branch plants of giant international outfits like Hill & Knowlton (which is now “Hill + Knowlton,” I’m sure for very important reasons, so everyone update your contact lists.)

Among the most interesting, though, are the specialized “former public official” firms. For instance, if you want a firm that specializes in using retired Canadian Forces generals to land military contracts for their private-sector clients, there’s CFN Consultants. If you want to talk to a retired deputy minister or the former head of a Quango, there’s the Sussex Circle. And then again, if what you want is to buy a former MP for a day, there’s the Parliamentary Group:

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When I first expanded my Pork Barrel study to include audits of individual programs, I said I’d start by working through Minister Diane Finley’s increasingly incompetent HRSDC first. Since then, however, my attention was piqued by a press release claiming that FedDev Ontario, which is dedicated to promoting small business in southern Ontario, would create 300 jobs by funding the expansion of a frozen pizza plant owned by a very large German multinational corporation. (Oetker is actually more honest than the government, and says that the real number is 120 jobs; the others are construction labour.)

It so happens that Oetker’s registered lobbyist is John Capobianco of Fleishman-Hillard, a former Conservative Party candidate sometimes cited in the media as a leading Conservative strategist.

Supposedly Oetker received its funding from FedDev’s Prosperity Initiative. Of the iniatitive’s three funding streams, two are for non-profits and the third, the Regional Diversification program, is for Ontario businesses with less than 1000 employees. I suppose if you count Oetker Canada as an entirely separate entity from Oetker, which I’m sure Oetker shareholders will cheerfully agree with, than it qualifies for category 3.

Not that I mind Oetker having a plant based in Canada. I wish them all the best with that, and I hope that 120 Londoners find good full-time jobs as promised.

But still. So, all of this said, I’ve decided to make FedDev Ontario’s Prosperity Initiative the second target of my Pork Barrel audits. Stay tuned for updates.

Someone has to continue to bear witness on this, and it will be me.

We have now reached the three-month mark since it was reported that the Lobbying Commissioner and the Conflict of Interest Commissioner had both completed investigations into illegal lobbying by former Harper regime insider Bruce Carson, subsequently an oilpatch advocate and water purification system consultant. And not a peep of that report yet. Why?

One can only assume that the contents of the report were so inflammatory that the PMO has been busily working away these past three months rewriting the report so that it will be more to their liking.

I’ve been watching the Canadian lobbyist registry for about a month now, as part of my ongoing Lobbyist Tracker project. So far, I’ve highlighted the hypocrisy of the Harper regime in complaining about “foreign environmentalists” at the pipeline inquiry while tolerating legions of foreign influence-purchasers in Ottawa, and the entirely unsurprising fact that corporations and trade groups, not environmentalists or trade unions or any other supposed “socialists,” account for the overwhelming share of lobbying activity.

Today I thought it would be useful to break down those categories a little more and see what industries are most active in our national capital. Between January 1-24 (my database is delayed by a week to allow time for registrations to get processed by the Commissioner’s office), there were more than 240 new registrations. Taking out some duplicates and some occasional oddities, they fell along the following lines:

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Alternative title: how many degrees of separation are there between Ontario anti-wind activists and fringe medicine?

Most of my trawling through the federal disclosure records and databases is simply menial drudgery. But there are occasional bright glimmers of something interesting. One of those is Trueman Tuck, lobbyist extraordinaire, of Belleville, Ontario. Tuck only has a couple of dozen active registrations right now, but he has registered 263 times since 2007. He’s self-employed, and he’s a very busy, busy man. Oh, and did I also mention that “Trueman of the Tuck clan,” as he also calls himself, is

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In response to Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver’s recent temper tantrum about “foreign billionaire socialists hijacking” the pipeline hearings, I reactivated my Lobbyist Watch project, which tracks the burgeoning lobbying sector in Ottawa. Ottawa has a love-hate relationship with this sector. Harper claims to hate it, but they still manage to get invited to all the good parties. During the first week of the New Year, when the federal government was ranting about foreign radicals influencing the pipeline hearings, about 40% of new lobbying registrations came from foreigners, and Harper didn’t make a peep of protest about it. That number now stands around 25%.

The second factor worth highlighting is that, despite following Vivian Krause down the conspiracy theory trail and claiming that foreign environmentalists and other NGOs are busy destroying the Canadian economy by buying influence in our political sphere, an overwhelming proportion of lobbyists sell their mouths and their minds to corporations which, almost without exception, are interested in less environmental regulations, less taxes, and less regulation.

During the first two weeks of this year, over 80% of new lobbyist registrations were by corporations and corporate trade groups, including all but two of the foreign influencers the government claims to despise. The nonprofit side of the balance sheet is dominated by universities and health groups. There were exactly 2 unions registered.

The Lobbyist Watch page also lists people who worked for the present government and subsequently became lobbyists, where the pay is presumably better, despite the fact that they worked for (and supposedly agreed with) a government that publicly insists that “politics will no longer be a stepping stone to a lucrative career in lobbying the government.” This week I have made additions to the list. DFH Public Affairs’s new senior consultant, Matthew Henley, was working as an assistant to Conservative MPs as recently as December 2010. Now he represents a Luxembourg mining outfit (more foreign varmints!) and a Montreal tech company.

It’s interesting to chart the official outrage over environmental groups that have taken money from foreign donors and now oppose a Canadian pipeline as part of an international anti-Canadian conspiracy (don’t ask me, ask Minister Joe Oliver). It’s even more interesting to see their studious unconcern about a more routine way in which foreigners, billionaires (but not billionaire socialists, an obvious non-entity), and others try to influence our government: the professional lobbying sector in Ottawa.

According to the Lobbying Commissioner, in the first week of this year, there were 47 new lobbying registrations. About 40% of lobbying came from foreigners, ranging from Chevron to Siemens. Fully 81% were from corporations.

The government claims it is very disturbed that some money from rich foreigners might influence the pipeline hearings. Judging from the Harper regime’s failure to institute any meaningful reforms to the lobbying sector since 2008, it would seem that they are not concerned that rich foreigners might influence government on other topics.

Three days have now passed since the dishon. Peter MacKay threatened to sue his critics for libel, and Sixth Estate has not received any requests to take down posts “attacking his credibility.”

I’m in the middle of revising and republishing another of my regular features, the Lobbyist Tracker, and offer the following morsels for readers interested in the seedy intersection where cash and politics meet:

• Chris Froggatt used to be minister John Baird’s chief of staff; now he’s the managing partner for the National Public Relations lobbying firm. It would be illegal for Froggatt to lobby the government directly, but his colleagues’ clients include Canadian Renewable Fuels Association and General Electric. Also at National, as “senior consultant,” is Baird’s deputy chief of staff, Cara Salci, and Conservative Resource Group insider Matt Triemstra.
  
• Ensight Canada, which I’ve repeatedly referred to as a Conservative propaganda outfit, has added another recent departure from the federal party. Lindsey Scully spent the last three years working as the policy director for minister Josee Verner, and before that spent three years working as a correspondence writer for Stephen I.
  
• Sherritt International, a mining and energy firm, has hired Conservative-tied PR and lobbying outfit Ensight Canada to lobby for them on greenhouse gas emissions. Their new shill is Will Stewart, who was caught illegally fundraising for the Conservatives a while back.
  
• Nexter Group Systems has hired former Liberal defence minister David Pratt to hawk their combat vehicles to his former department. Pratt works at GCI, also home to close Harper advisor Ken Boessenkool. Pratt is a former Defence Minister.
• Speaking of former Liberals, Bryon Wilfert, who was turfed from office this spring, is now working for the Tactix lobbying firm as “senior strategic advisor.”