A Canadian advocate for government accountability is calling out the Conservative government for failing to close major loopholes in its proposed reforms to lobbying regulations.

“They do not close dangerously unethical loopholes in federal laws that allow secret lobbying and allow politicians and officials to lobby the day after they leave office,” said Duff Conacher, coordinator of the Ottawa-based advocacy group Democracy Watch.

The proposed changes will require lobbyists to begin registering communications with MPs, senators, and the Opposition leader’s senior staff.

Previously, only communications with cabinet ministers and senior appointed government officials like deputy ministers had to be logged.

However, lobbyists will still not be required to disclose their activities if they are unpaid or lobby less than 20 per cent of their time, or 35 days in six months, as an employee of a business. Also, lobbyists will still only be required to register prearranged oral communications.

Informal or spontaneous phone calls or meetings will still slip under the radar, as will all written communication, Conacher said.

“That means you can just send an email or letter, or have an informal meeting on the back nine of a golf course,” he said. “The real rainmakers, as they’re called, don’t often need to spend a lot of time, and they don’t need to be paid.”

The essential flaw in the system, Conacher said, is that onus is currently on lobbyists, or rather that limited selection of lobbyists defined by law, to disclose their communications.

That onus should be shifted, he said, to the public officials being lobbied and any communication representing an organization or coordinated body should be disclosed. The legal definition of a “lobbyist” could then be dropped entirely.

“This would not be a burden because logs of calls, meetings and letters are already taken by the staffs of every politician,” Conacher said, “So once a month you’d have a staff-person upload those logs onto a website. They could even do it as they come in.”

Only the federal government, six provinces including B.C., and the Northwest Territories currently have any lobbying regulations at all. And only the federal government and Quebec require individual communications to be logged.

Elsewhere lobbyists either operate completely invisibly, or need only register that they are lobbying in a given six month period, and that only if they meet the legal definition of a lobbyist.

This is one area that Canada lags well behind the United States, Conacher said.

“In the United States they also have to disclose the amount that is spent on lobbying” he said, “That’s a thing that the public has the right to know, if one side had a massive amount of money and was able as a result to effectively buy a decision.”

The current Conservative amendments are being made through regulation, Conacher said, so they won’t go before Parliament at all. But the Lobbying Act is up for review in the fall.

“There are people in the NDP who support reversing the onus. Hopefully that will gain momentum,” he said.

“You can’t stop [secret lobbying] from happening, but you can at least make it illegal to do it, and that will discourage a lot of people.”

Ryan Elias is completing a practicum at The Tyee.