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Laurie in Debate

Bill 1: Lobbyists Act

Alberta Hansard – November 21, 2007

Bill 1: Lobbyists Act, Committee of the Whole debate in the 26th Legislature of Alberta, 3rd Session by Ms. Laurie Blakeman, MLA Edmonton-Centre

Ms Blakeman: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. To the government, thank you for this amendment. Frankly, if the hon. minister opposite hadn’t brought forward this amendment, I had already prepared almost exactly the same amendment to bring forward because I think it is about understanding and valuing the contribution that that charitable/ not-for-profit/ volunteer sector brings to our community. My fear was that members of the government just didn’t get it. They’re so corporate focused that they didn’t get how important this sector is.

Over the last year and a half I’ve been discussing in a number of debates and in private members’ statements: just imagine what our society would look like if we took away some of these organizations. Frankly, capacity is an issue in those organizations right now. Many of them have been operational for a number of years. They’ve taken on more and more programming that, frankly, used to be paid for by government or run by government. Now they’re being expected to do RFPs in order to get contracts when they’re the sole possible contractor out there. That one always strikes me as a bit weird. But, essentially, that sector was really stressed, and I have been trying to raise that issue in this Assembly for some time. My fear, when I saw the work both of this bill and of the committee, was that the government hadn’t gotten it, and clearly the government did get it, or at least some people got it because we’ve got a government amendment in front of us for this bill.

I also want to acknowledge the importance of that sector and their advocacy on their own behalf because this is a helping sector. This is filled with organizations that often exist to do good work for others, and they tend to be self-effacing. They tend to be vigorous in defending the interests of their client base but not so aggressive in promoting their own well-being. I had concerns that they were not going to be able to catch the ear and get the understanding of the government members, and, boy, did that community pull together. Now, there are clearly some individuals who were introduced in this Assembly when we started into the debate on Bill 1. I’m thinking of Bob Wyatt from the Muttart philanthropic foundation, the centres in Edmonton and Calgary for the volunteer organizations. There were a number of key individuals who really worked hard and poured heart and soul into helping government understand how important this was, and I thank them for that effort. It was a lot of work. It probably cost them money that they didn’t have to spend.

I think individuals probably paid for some things, mileage and things, out of their own pocket in order to get to Edmonton or get access to MLAs and help them to understand how important this was. I’m very happy to see it.

I can’t underline enough the capacity issue. I hope that when this bill has passed, the government will remember this and go back and look at some of its funding formulas and come to understand better what has happened. I remember years ago hearing one of the government backbenchers talking about how great this sector was because everything was free and what else the government could get this sector to do because it was free. I cringed because I knew it wasn’t free. Even for volunteer organizations there is a cost to them. There’s a cost to the auditing. There’s a cost to volunteer appreciation. There’s a cost to volunteer recruitment and training. That stuff is not free. But the government has tended to approach this voluntary/ charitable/ not-for-profit sector with the idea that they are free because they have a lot of volunteers working for them. As a result we’ve tended to have line-item funding for these organizations, so if they’re, you know, contracted or they’re given the responsibility of providing a certain program or service, all the government funds them for is just exactly that line item of that program and service. But when the government was doing it, they were covering the cost of the phone line that the person used and the benefits for the staff person and the desk that they used and the chair that they used and even the extra square footage in the office because you had an additional person running that program. It goes to the not-for-profit sector, and all of that ancillary money doesn’t go with it, just the line item to deliver the program.

We have this situation where the not-for-profit/ charitable/ volunteer sector is actually fundraising the money to pay for that phone line, that phone, that desk, that extra square footage in their leased space to provide the programs. It has come at a cost. Now, those organizations have been happy to provide that and believe strongly in providing those services, but I still will push the government to examine the way they fund these groups.

I won’t go into it now, but the other thing that has to be looked at is this ridiculousness of requiring some sort of request for proposal situation when in most cases you have sole providers existing in the community. Who else is going to give you mental health services but the Canadian Mental Health Association? I mean, come on. Nobody else offers those services, but you’re making them go through this. It’s ridiculous. Anyway, don’t get me started on that tangent.

The minister had also referred to accountability in that sector. I can attest to that. I know that there are some, particularly smaller organizations, that to an outsider’s eye may appear to be less accountable than you might find, for example, in a small business with a couple of employees, and you’ve got a charity or a volunteer-based organization with a couple of volunteers. That’s true some-times. People don’t know what they’re doing, and they make mistakes, and they don’t file the correct paperwork or keep up with things. Yeah, that’s true. But for the most part this sector is the most accountable sector out of anything you can come up with, including government, because every time they apply to do some-thing, they have to be totally transparent and accountable. They account over and over and over again for their funding, and often they account three ways for the same dang funding because they’ve applied to the city, to the province, and to the feds. We still haven’t managed to mesh our reporting structures so that they can do one report back and it’s accepted by all three levels of government. Oh, no. We’re going to make them do a different accounting report back to the city, a different one to the province, and a different one to the feds.

So the Minister of Health and Wellness is exactly right. They spend a third of their time trying to raise the money to deliver the programs and a third of the time accounting, and now they’re only delivering a third of the programs because that’s all the time they’ve got left. So we have created a number of requirements about accountability, and for the most part they meet them.

I also want to talk about lobbying from that sector. I would argue that that is the sector that we as legislators need to hear from. They are delivering those programs and services on the front line. They have an expertise that we need, so we should be asking for it, but they should also feel free to come to us and give us that information because in many cases that’s where we get it. Who was it that first flagged for us the issue of children going to school hungry? It was that volunteer, charitable, not-for-profit sector. Who started to talk 10, 15 years ago or more about the increasing number of people who were homeless? That same sector. They’re on the front lines. They’re seeing it happen. They were the experts, and we need them to come and talk to us.

I would also argue, Mr. Chairman, that when they are lobbying or advocating to the government, they are not advocating for their shareholders. They’re not advocating for somebody to make more money out of this. These groups are always coming forward advocating for their residents, for their clients, for the individuals that they are assisting. Whether they’re talking about youth sports or seniors or Meals on Wheels or feeding programs or an arts and culture group, they’re not there to improve their own lives even if we’re talking about the administrator. They are there talking about how their audience or client or resident base is being affected, and that’s information that as legislators we need to have. They need to be talking to us. We need to be listening to them. The idea of the requirements that we were going to subject them to of registering as a lobbyist and all of that other accountability I think would have really stood in the way of service provision.

What this amendment will do in the end is excuse or remove from the requirements of the legislation those groups that I tend to think of as the not-for-profit, volunteer, charitable sector. Essentially, this is the social service agencies, the faith-based agencies, people working in poverty issues, housing and homelessness issues, arts and culture, multiculturalism, youth, youth at risk, youth recreational programming, health and wellness for youth, seniors, the people in the disabled community, services for them, recreational opportunities. We keep saying that we need a healthier population, that we need to reduce obesity. This is how we do it: through those recreational opportunities. Eat less, exercise more. These are the groups that help provide that exercise incentive.

Of course, the health-based agencies like diabetes, heart and stroke, asthma, and a number of other agencies like that: those agencies are operating on behalf of the people they help. They’re not there as profit-making ventures. The very definition of a not-for-profit doesn’t mean that they’re bad businesspeople. They’re actually for the most part excellent businesspeople, considering that they can manage to squeeze change out of a penny over and over and over again.

I want to support this amendment. I think it’s a good idea. It has addressed a huge problem with this bill. I wanted this lobbyists bill to come in. I’ve been campaigning for it for years. I would have been really in a position of struggling to support this bill if we had not had this amendment come forward, so I am very pleased to see it. I am very supportive of it. I really encourage the rest of the members of the Assembly to support this amendment, and we will get on with the rest of the bill.

Thank you.

...

Ms Blakeman: I think part of the issue, not that I would ever dare to speak on behalf of the Minister of Health and Wellness, is that you’re still going to have to count that 100 hours because as you start to get close to it, you’d better know where you are because at the point where you hit that, you’re going to have to register. So basically the burden is still on that whole charitable sector to keep track of it in the same way as that $ 30,000 mark for GST registra-tion. For most people, unless they know that they’re really low, like $ 5,000, if you have a really good year and it starts to creep a little higher, you’re going to have to go back and make sure that you’ve got all of that in place. The point was that this was an onerous burden on that charitable sector, and the reason for the Lobbyists Act is not specifically aimed at them. It was aimed at others who were trying to influence public policy for their own purposes, and the charitable sector is trying to influence public policy on behalf of members of the public. Not that I would presume to speak for the minister, of course, but that’s my reasoning for it and why I supported this particular amendment.

If I might just very briefly, Mr. Chairman, I lost my train of thought earlier and I’ve now remembered it. The point I was trying to make there is that the not-for-profit sector is not in business to make a profit or to benefit any one of its individual directors. The whole purpose of a board of directors is to represent the public and to oversee the operations of the organization in a policy-setting way to ensure that the organization serves all Albertans or all Canadians and not to benefit an individual. It’s considered a huge no- no in that sector if somebody is benefiting financially in a major way beyond a reasonable salary from the activities of the volunteer/ charitable/ not-for-profit sector. I always put slashes between all those words.

It’s not to say that not-for-profits always lose money. They don’t.

They’re very good businesspeople, I would argue. In many cases there are fewer not-for-profits that fail from bankruptcy than there are small businesses, so in fact they’re very good financial manag-ers. Any surplus they have at the end of the year is reinvested into the programming, so no one individual benefits from that. They don’t get to go to Hawaii. They don’t get to give themselves a bonus. That money is reinvested in the product or the service that they provide on behalf of the public.

Again, that’s another major difference between that and the corporate sector. That’s not to say – please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying that the corporate sector is some big, bad bogeyman. They’re not. They do wonderful things for Alberta and create a lot of opportunities and a lot of jobs for people and generate a lot of money. That’s a good thing. Why would I say that was bad? I’m not. But the not-for-profit sector is there for very different reasons, and they are guided and set up completely differently in order, basically, to guard against any one individual or group of individuals benefiting as a result of an activity of the not-for-profit and benefiting in, you know, a major, pay themselves kind of way, is what I’m trying to articulate.

Thank you for the opportunity to clarify that. Again, I urge everyone to support this amendment.