Canada’s lobbying regulator tells the public it double-checks a five per cent sample of the meeting reports lobbyists file every month. In each of the last two fiscal years it checked substantially less than that, and in 2024-25 the share fell to roughly one report in 30, according to figures published in the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying’s own annual reports to Parliament.
The Office describes the process in identical language in both its 2023-24 and 2024-25 annual reports. It extracts “a sample (5%) of new communication reports filed in the Registry of Lobbyists every month” and asks the designated public office holders named in them to confirm the information is complete and accurate. It is the only routine check on whether the lobbying meetings disclosed in the federal registry happened the way they were reported.
The 2023-24 report says 34,748 communication reports had been filed as of March 31, 2024, and that office holders reviewed 1,511 of them. That is 4.3 per cent. The 2024-25 report says 32,293 reports had been filed as of March 31, 2025, and that office holders reviewed 1,064. That is 3.3 per cent. A full five per cent sample would have been about 1,737 reports in 2023-24 and about 1,615 in 2024-25. Verification results can lag the month a report is filed, but neither year comes close to the stated sample.
The Office accounts for part of the decline. Its 2024-25 report says verification was paused during October and November 2024 to allow changes requiring lobbyists to add subject matter details to communication reports, “resulting in a slightly lower than normal number of verified reports.” Two missed months out of 12 does not on its own explain a shortfall of more than 500 reports against the five per cent standard.
What the checks turned up matters as well. In 2023-24, office holders flagged 176 of the 1,511 reports they reviewed as inaccurate, about one in nine. In 2024-25, 929 of 1,064 reports were confirmed complete and accurate, just over 87 per cent, while 110 were inaccurate and contained 117 separate errors, since some reports carried more than one.
Those 2024-25 verification figures do not add up. The 929 accurate reports and 110 inaccurate ones account for 1,039 of the 1,064 the report says were reviewed, leaving 25 unexplained. The previous year’s report reconciled exactly because it published a third category. Of the 1,511 reports reviewed in 2023-24, 1,281 were accurate, 176 were inaccurate and 54 involved office holders who said the communication did not take place. That category does not appear in the 2024-25 report.
It is not the only figure in that report that fails a cross-check. The 2024-25 report states that October 2024 “set a new all-time record with 4,509 reports, beating the previous record of 4,435 established in November 2024 by more than 500 reports.” A record established in November 2024 cannot precede one set in October 2024. The 4,435 figure belongs to November 2023. The 2023-24 annual report states that “for the second year in a row, the month of November set a record for the highest monthly number of communication reports recorded with 4,435 communication reports.” The 2024-25 report’s own monthly table puts November 2024 at 3,815 and restates November 2023 at 4,456. On either set of numbers the margin is not more than 500 reports, but 74 or 53.
The registration figures in the same report have a similar problem. Its headline states that 14,215 registrations were filed in 2024-25, with 13,167 on time and 1,048 late. Its registration activity table lists 2,761 new registrations filed on time, 9,893 updates and 516 reactivations, which sums to 13,170 rather than 13,167, and to 14,218 in total rather than 14,215. The report’s narrative puts new registrations at 2,912, while the same table’s new row totals 2,915. The equivalent table in the 2023-24 report reconciles without a gap.
None of this disturbs the broad picture the two reports set out. Lobbying of federal officials sits at or near record levels, with 31,058 oral communications arranged in advance recorded in 2024-25 and an all-time high of 7,421 active lobbyists in January 2025. What it bears on is how closely those filings are checked, and how carefully the resulting numbers are compiled before they are tabled in Parliament.
The volume is about to rise again. A backgrounder the Office published on July 16, 2025 notes that the Lobbying Act requires a parliamentary committee to review it every five years, that the last review took place in 2012, and that no review occurred in either 2017 or 2022. In the absence of that review, Commissioner Nancy Belanger used her own authority to lower the in-house registration threshold from roughly 32 hours of lobbying a month to eight hours in any four-week period, effective January 19, 2026. The change is expected to pull thousands of organizations and corporations into the registry for the first time, all of them filing into the same verification system.
