This past summer, the Liberal Party threw a glitzy garden reception at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa for major backers who donated at least $800. In attendance were 16 senior cabinet members, including Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan and Tourism Minister Randy Boissonnault.

Among the guests were two lobbyists for pipeline company Enbridge, which has been heavily lobbying the federal government on a host of climate issues. In fact, within 40 days of the event, Enbridge lobbyists met with government officials from the departments of Employment and Social Development, Finance, and Innovation, Science and Economic Development, the same departments headed by the ministers at the party.

An investigation by the IJF identified 166 lobbyists who attended Liberal fundraisers since 2019 while working for organizations that lobby to influence policy, receive funds or gain government contracts.

The Liberals have repeatedly pledged to stop so-called “cash-for-access” fundraisers, even going so far as to say they would boot lobbyists who try to attend from the events. The IJF’s analysis, however, shows the events continue unabated.

One transparency watchdog calls this a “legalized bribery system.”

“It smells of conflict of interest to have a lobbyist at an exclusive event that only top donors are allowed to go to,” said Duff Conacher, founder of Democracy Watch.

The IJF compared the guest lists of 120 fundraiser events since 2019. Lobbyists and company representatives of lobbying groups attended at least 51 of them.

These lobbyists represented, collectively, about 790 organizations as some lobbyists work for consultancy firms and can represent dozens of clients at a time. One lobbyist working for Sandstone Group, for example, had 60 clients when he attended fundraisers over the past four years.

There’s nothing illegal about lobbyists going to fundraisers or supporting political parties. However, the Liberals said they would bar lobbyists who were registered to lobby a federal department headed by a minister present at a fundraiser. The IJF found hundreds of organizations that were doing just this. (To see how we did this analysis, read the methodology section at the bottom of this article).

Carla Ventin, a former press secretary for the department of Agriculture and Agri-Food, is now a lobbyist for Food, Health & Consumer Products of Canada (FHCP), a trade association representing some of the biggest food companies like Coca-Cola, Nestlé and McCain. She attended a fundraiser on June 10, 2019 where 10 cabinet members were present, including Agriculture and Agri-Food Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Within roughly two months of that fundraiser, lobbyists for FHCP met nine times with officials from departments represented at the fundraiser, including minister Bibeau herself.

Ventin attended another fundraiser six months later where cabinet ministers from Global Affairs and Innovation, Science and Economic Development were featured guests. FHCP lobbyists again met with officials from those departments within a few days.

Repeated emails and voicemails to FHCP were not returned.

Have you attended a Liberal Party fundraiser? We want to hear from you. Please contact [email protected] or go to the IJF’s tips page to read how to contact us securely.

Enbridge, whose lobbyists were at one fundraiser, says it follows the rules and files monthly reports detailing all meetings with officials.

“As the Guidance from the Lobbying Commissioner makes clear, should an employee or a representative of Enbridge attend political activities, such as attending a fundraising event in a personal capacity, that is their right,” Enbridge spokesperson Gina Sutherland told the IJF.

Rules with exceptions

Internal Liberal party rules bar lobbyists from attending fundraisers if a politician in attendance oversees an issue they’re looking to influence. In 2017, following investigations by the lobbying and ethics commissioners, as well as calls for change from the NDP and the Conservatives, the Liberals introduced new legislation designed to make fundraising more transparent.

In 2018, the Globe and Mail found that 200 lobbyists attended fundraisers despite those rules. Of the 200 lobbyists identified by the newspaper, more than three-quarters were registered to lobby a cabinet minister at the event.

This proportion hasn’t changed. 137 out of the 166 lobbyists at fundraisers since 2019, or 83 per cent, were registered to lobby the department whose cabinet minister was at the event they attended.

The party’s rules are full of exceptions. Laurier Club events, which are exclusive to the party’s biggest donors, are exempt from the rules. Lobbyists can also sign a declaration promising not to engage in lobbying activities at an event.

“Donor appreciation events do not have separate ticket prices, and in most cases consist of long-time volunteers and supporters of the party who are not making a specific contribution for an event with one particular special guest,” said Matteo Rossi, a spokesperson for the Liberal Party.

Rossi also said that the party checks the federal lobbyist registry website to see if any guests are active lobbyists, but sometimes the information available is not up to date.

“A number of the [lobbyists] did not yet have visible lobbying registrations online as of the time of the event, or showed up at the door without having registered in advance (more common for events organized by local volunteers),” he said.

However, the IJF found 15 lobbyists at regular fundraisers, who together represented 25 organizations that were registered to lobby a federal department whose minister was in attendance. For example, a senior officer from Shaw Communications attended a fundraiser on August 9, 2019 in Calgary, where Chrystia Freeland was in attendance. Shaw had been registered to lobby Global Affairs since April that year.

The federal Lobbyists’ Code of Conduct does not define penalties for these situations, and to date, no lobbyists have been reprimanded for it.

Jocelyne Brisebois, a spokesperson for the federal ethics commissioner, said that public office holders are prohibited from “personally soliciting funds,” but there’s nothing barring lobbyists from being party donors.

However, Conacher said, giving major donors exclusive access to events with senior cabinet ministers runs counter to the prime minister’s own open and accountable government manifesto, which states:

“There should be no preferential access to government, or appearance of preferential access, accorded to individuals or organizations because they have made financial contributions to politicians and political parties.”

Lobbyists reluctant to talk about fundraisers

The IJF sent multiple interview requests to two large lobbying consultant firms whose lobbyists attended at least seven fundraisers with Liberal politicians. Hill+Knowlton Strategies and Crestview Strategy did not respond to questions by phone or email.

A few individual lobbyists reached by the IJF said they were doing nothing wrong, and have been involved in politics for most of their careers. Some responded to emails with a link to the guidelines by the lobbying commissioner, which considers attending fundraisers a “lower-risk” political activity.

Daniel Carbin, who was a lobbyist for Ontario union SEIU Healthcare while attending a 2019 fundraiser, said he never lobbied during the event.

“I have been there to have some drinks, support the party and catch up with friends that I used to work with. Usually these events have been freebies to thank me for having donated to the Liberal party,” he wrote in an email.

Prime Minister Trudeau has previously said that he’s often approached by lobbyists at fundraisers, but they don’t influence government policies.

This is of little comfort to transparency watchdogs like Conacher, who cited studies on the science of persuasion by American psychologist Robert Cialdini. Reciprocity, Cialdini said, is the natural human impulse to repay a debt, no matter how small.

“Even tiny gifts create a sense of obligation to return the favour,” Conacher said. “People receive something, they feel compelled to give back. It’s the golden rule.”

How we did this story

To identify lobbyists that attended Liberal fundraising events from January 2019 to July 2022, the IJF used two data sources:

  • Lists of fundraising attendees published by the Liberal Party and Elections Canada
  • The federal lobbying registry, which the IJF scrapes daily and makes publicly accessible. This contains the names of lobbyists and company representatives who registered to lobby the federal government.

We used a technique called fuzzy matching to find names that are similar to each other. Of the roughly 600 matched names, we were able to identify 166 lobbyists and company representatives who attended Liberal fundraisers. Of those, 88 were in-house lobbyists, 64 were consultant lobbyists and 23 were company officials who were not registered as lobbyists, but whose company was lobbying at the time of the fundraiser (several lobbyists changed jobs during this time so these numbers add up to more than 166).

Company officials are individuals listed as the “responsible officer” on their organization’s lobbying registration but aren’t listed as a lobbyist themselves. These people typically have a senior role within their organization, such as president or chief executive officer.

We only included lobbyists and company officials who had active lobbying registrations at the time of the fundraiser. Some lobbyists attended more than one fundraiser, making their combined attendance number 320.

We manually verified if the matched names are indeed the same person using social media accounts, their declared postal codes on attendee lists, official company websites, LinkedIn profiles and other publicly-available information. We contacted 92 people who have a common name or have little corroborating information online. Twenty-nine responded, of which 22 confirmed they were the same people.

Our list is not exhaustive, and it is possible that we did not count all lobbyists who attended fundraisers due to limitations with the available data. For example, some lobbyists don’t list an address in their registrations so it wasn’t possible to match the address of the political donor to that of the lobbyist.

There were also multiple matches of lobbyists whose registration date started a few days after a fundraiser, or ended a few days before. These were discarded to focus only on active lobbyists.

With files from Elena De Luigi