User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Fossil fuels lobby in Canada

Fossil fuels lobby in Canada concerning public office holders and lobbyists at the federal level are governed by the Federal Lobbying Act. Provinces and territories have lobbying laws as well.

Overview
According to a January 2020, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) article as part of their Corporate Mapping Project, oil, gas and coal companies and their industry associations lobbyists met with Canadian government officials five times more often non-government environmental NGOs. This was based on a CCPA November 2019 study of a seven year study that ran from 2011 to 2018.

The Lobbyists' Code of Conduct (Code) was last updated in 2015. there was a process underway to review and update the Code which included a call for submissions by the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada (Commissioner) from stakeholders, such as organizations or firms engaged in lobbying federal public office holders. Proposed changes included revising the quantification of an expiry date for a "cooling-off period""when you have done political work for the benefit of a public office holder, the period of time that must pass before you can lobby that official or their associate and is calculated from the day after the political work ended".

Alberta
In the province of Alberta, which has the largest fossil fuel industry in Canada, the province is required to update its own Lobbyist Act every five years. Following a seven-month review which was concluded in April 2022, the province's Ethics Commissioner Marguerite Trussler made a number of recommendations. At a 26 April 2020 meeting to discuss the findings, United Conservative Party (UCP) MLA voted to reject Trussler's recommended changes which had included the creation of registry tracking "meetings between lobbyists and public office holders". Drew Barnes, an Independent MLA for Cypress-Medicine Hat, who served on the Committee raised concerns about the relationship between the office of the premier Jason Kenney and the Wellington Advocacy, which was established in 2019 by Nick Koolsbergen who had also led the UCP's provincial election campaigns and also served as Kenney's chief of staff. Three people who worked in the premier's office had joined Wellington Advocacy's lobbying firm by 2022. Barnes had called for a longer "cooling-off period".