The federal lobbying commissioner’s latest annual report to Parliament describes the busiest year of lobbying on record, but several of the figures it uses to describe that year do not reconcile with the report’s own charts and tables, a review by Canada News Media has found.
The Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying’s 2025-26 annual report, covering April 1, 2025, to March 31, 2026, says lobbyists filed 39,879 reports of pre-arranged oral communications with designated public office holders, an all-time high and more than 8,800 above the year before. Its month-by-month table supports that total. The 12 monthly figures for 2025-26 add to exactly 39,879, and the 2024-25 row adds to 31,059.
Other numbers in the report do not hold up as well. It states that active lobbyists reached a record 8,644 in March 2026 and describes that as 14 per cent higher than the previous record of 7,421, set in January 2025. The difference between those two figures is 1,223, an increase of 16.5 per cent.
The report’s text also says active registrations reached an all-time record of 7,458 in March 2026. The bar chart printed below that paragraph labels March 2026 at 7,568, a gap of 110 registrations. The same paragraph says 211 new organizations and corporations joined the registry “between January 19, 2026, and May 5, 2006,” a date two decades before the period it describes.
The largest inconsistency sits in a table on late communication reports, part of a section the commissioner devotes to late filing. In the row for reports filed more than 180 days late, the table lists 15 from consultant lobbyists, 29 from organizations and six from corporations, then gives a combined total of nine. Those three figures add to 50. The corporations column adds to 395 rather than the 394 printed as its total, and the combined column’s rows add to 1,997 rather than the 2,037 shown at the bottom. A note under the table says the data cover reports filed between April 1, 2024, and March 31, 2025, which is the previous fiscal year, while the tables above it on the same page cite the 2025-26 period.
The verification figures also leave a remainder. The office says it asked 207 designated public office holders to verify 1,833 communication reports in 2025-26, and that 1,545 were confirmed complete and accurate while 191 contained inaccuracies that were then corrected. Together that is 1,736, leaving 97 reports whose outcome the report does not explain. Canada News Media reported in September that the 2024-25 report had a similar unexplained gap of 25 reports. The sample itself grew: 1,833 reports is about 4.6 per cent of the year’s 39,879 filings, closer to the five per cent sample the office describes than the roughly 3.3 per cent checked the year before.
None of the discrepancies changes the report’s central finding. Lobbying of federal officials is at record levels after Commissioner Nancy Bélanger lowered the in-house registration threshold from 32 hours to eight hours over four consecutive weeks, effective Jan. 19, 2026. Communication reports filed for February 2026 totalled 4,604, against 2,063 a year earlier, and March reached 4,298, against 1,415. The report also counts 1,148 registrations and 2,037 communication reports filed late during the year.
The accuracy of the office’s own statistics matters now because Parliament is weighing its advice. The House of Commons ethics committee began a review of the Lobbying Act in February 2026, and the report says Bélanger submitted 21 recommendations before appearing on March 9, including administrative monetary penalties for non-compliance. The office has not been asked to comment for this story, and Canada News Media will update it with any response.
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Sources: Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada, Annual Report 2025-26 (PDF edition, Publications.gc.ca), pages 6, 7, 8, 11 and 12. Calculations by Canada News Media. Earlier coverage: Lobbying Watchdog Verified 3% of Reports, Not 5%.
