Comments on: Voluntary registration of lobbying is worthless

By: The confessions of Ahern and Cowen – The Story

The confessions of Ahern and Cowen – The Story — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:04:27 +0000

[...] book by Gary Murphy, Raj Charai and John Hogan called Regulating Lobying: A Global Comparison, it being launched [...]

By: garyevergreen

garyevergreen — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:31:06 +0000

Some of the Fine Gael proposals on registering lobbyists do seem to be based on the federal Canadian model which was originally introduced in 1989, amended in 1995, 2003 and again in 2008. There are differences between the federal model and some of the models in the differing provinces. As it stands Ontario (1998); Nova Scotia (2001); British Columbia (2001); Quebec (2002); Newfoundland (2005) and Alberta (2007) all have registers of lobbyists. In work with my colleagues Raj Chari of TCD and John Hogan of DIT we show that the Canadian federal is the most robust of these in terms of transparency and accountability but it is also well to note that most American states and the American federal legislation is more stringent than that which exists in Canada.

We have had a look at both the Labour and Fine Gael proposals and according to our scoring system the Labour proposals are slightly more robust, scoring 31 out of 100, to Fine Gael’s 19, this probably being due to the fact that they have actually had four different iterations of their bill. One of the weaknesses in the Fine Gael proposals is that, I suppose not surprisingly, it tends to be a bit vague and would need to be filled out with specifics as to penalties and also the mechanics as to how the regulator will function. For comparative purposes Canada federal scores 50, US federal scores 62, while Washington State scores a whopping 87!

By: Donal O'Brolchain

Donal O'Brolchain — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 06:57:05 +0000

@Gary
Interesting piece.

Is it true that the FG proposals are based on a Canadian way of registering lobyyists?
Do you know if this Canadian model applies at both Federal and Provincial levels?
Given that it has been reported that that the FG proposals differ from the Canadian “model”, can you offer any view on the differences in terms of
1. reasons/logic for the changes;
2. merits or otherwise of the FG changes;
3. other models from other “smaller” western-style democracies?