The provincial Lobbyist Registration Act puts lawyers working for local governments in an awkward position, said Bill Buholzer, a lawyer who has registered on behalf of five such clients.
“I think what I’m doing is technically caught by [the Act],” he said, explaining why he’d registered on behalf of New Westminster, Squamish, Keremeos, Vernon and the Fraser Valley Regional District. But most of his work is on routine things like getting specific powers granted to communities under the Local Government Act, he said. “It's very mundane, dry stuff.”
The work does, however, appear to fit the definition of “lobbying” used in the registration act, he said. That puts him and other lawyers in the odd position of having to choose between meeting the act’s requirements to report publicly what they are doing and upholding the solicitor-client privilege which would normally restrict a lawyer from saying publicly who his or her clients are.
“There seems to be a gap between what’s caught and what’s supposed to be caught,” he said, adding the government should look closely at the issue when it goes through the promised review of the Lobbyist Registration Act.
It would not, however, make sense to exempt all lawyers from registering, he said. “There are lawyers who actually don't practice much law but are using contacts to bring business to their law firm.”
There are also lawyers like former Liberal Party president Andrew Wilkinson and former Attorney General Geoff Plant, who is registered to lobby as “Paul Plant”, whose work for clients clearly meets a more traditional definition of lobbying, such as arranging or attending meetings with cabinet ministers or seeking policy changes.
A simpler way to achieve the same goal of transparency, allowing the public to see who is talking to their elected officials, would be to require representatives to make their appointment books publicly available online, Buholzer said.
The Tyee reported this week on the trend of lobbyists registering to work for local governments, some of which appears to be lawyers doing the kind of work Buholzer describes, and some of which appears to be people with political connections seeking the attention of MLAs and cabinet ministers for their clients.
Andrew MacLeod is The Tyee’s Legislative Bureau Chief in Victoria. Reach him here.
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OilbertaRedTory
2 years ago
The priesthood of the Lobbyists ...
... will be reformed by the wiki-net just as surely as the mediaevalists were pillaged by the printing press.
As John Calvin (nearly) taught:
“each Citizen bears the exalted title of Lobbyist, and therefore has a rightful place in the offering of Policy Ideas in the Legislature. It is not the priest alone who has access into the heavenly sanctuary."
The Tyee could be among the first to nail these theses on the doors of Canada's Legislatures ; wiki-made public policy is coming :
http://www.dominion.ca/release22012009.pdf
http://mixedink.com/OpenGov
http://cpd.org.au/about
Van Isle
2 years ago
I cannot understand how Mr.
I cannot understand how Mr. Buholzer figures it's a conflict if he's registered as a lobbist. Just because he's a lawyer and working at something else is, in my mind, not a conflict. Imagine if he was hired on by a person to paint out a building but he can't give out any information about it because it's a conflict and he's a lawyer too. Typical lawyer, to complicate an issue, create a fog.
Eleanor Gregory
2 years ago
the dilemna for lawyers registering as lobbyists
The conflict that Bill Buholzer is talking about is the conflict between maintaining confidentiality about his client and the work he is doing for the client, and the requirement under the lobbyist registration to make at least some of that information public. That is a dilemna for lawyers. When I saw some of the lawyers listed in Andrew MacLeod's article my immediate reaction was that surely some of those lawyers were simply doing legal work for local government clients that involved liasing with the provincial government. That's quite different from setting up meetings with cabinet ministers.