Lobbyists for major oil, pharmaceutical, real estate and anti-union companies were elected to nearly half of the seats on the Conservative party’s top governing body at its convention in Quebec City.
Those elected don’t exactly represent the interests of “common people” whom Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has said he’s championing in speeches and ads rolled out in the past months.
In a keynote address on Friday, Poilievre evoked the life of a single mother on minimum wage, and the struggles of a farmer, electrician, and young couple feeling “like strangers in their own country.”
But despite his extensive efforts to rebrand the party as a defender of ordinary people, the lobbyists now on the national council are a reflection of the Conservatives’ powerful, traditional corporate backers.
They include Amber Ruddy, a lobbyist for oil companies like Tourmaline Oil Corp. and Husky, several pharmaceutical giants including GlaxoSmithKline, and Merit, the construction association which pushes governments to pass anti-union policies.
Ruddy has also been registered to lobby for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, the country’s loudest opponent of wage increases for workers. She previously worked for the federation as a director.
Another newly elected council member is Heather Feldbusch, a former staffer for Alberta’s United Conservative Party. According to the Alberta Lobbyist Registry, she has lobbied for oil companies like Enbridge, real estate manager Avenue Commercial, and aviation and real estate investment firm Westerkirk Capital, which is owned by one of the country’s richest billionaires, Sherry Brydson.
Three other council members currently or previously worked for Capital Hill Group, a major Canadian firm that lobbies for Amazon, Big Tech, security and financial companies, as well as the Canadian Federation of Apartment Associations, the country’s largest private housing industry group that has opposed capping rent increases.
Many of these same corporations have made record profits in recent years, hiking up prices, driving up inflation, and making life more unaffordable for the “ordinary people” that Poilievre has said his party will help.
Conservatives squashed grassroots effort to exclude lobbyists
The volunteer-based national council is the party’s highest and most powerful authority on nomination races and other election readiness and governance matters.
A day before the council’s election at the convention, Conservative members voted down a resolution calling for lobbyists to be barred from serving on the 20-member governing body, in a policy session off-limits to the media.
The Hill Times reported that some of the riding associations who sponsored the resolution had set up an anonymous website, nolobbyistsoncouncil.ca, to campaign against the lobbyists running in the election.
“Members of National Council are supposed to represent the members of our Party and work with MPs and members of caucus to help us win the election,” the site read. “But lobbyists are meeting with MPs to represent their corporate clients.”
“How can we ever call out the Liberals if we are guilty of perceived conflicts of interests ourselves?”
A few hours after the election results were announced on Saturday afternoon, the website disappeared. Its creators did not reply to a request for comment.
According to The Breach’s investigation, at least seven of the 20 new national council members are now corporate lobbyists.
There’s also a real estate agent, two investment bankers, several corporate lawyers, and a sales director at a company that caters private jets to wealthy clients—something the “common people” will unlikely be partaking in anytime soon.
Behind Poilievre are the same old corporate interests
Despite Poilievre’s rebukes of “gatekeepers” and the “elite,” the composition of his party’s national council closely mirrors the corporate interests the party has traditionally represented.
Those interests are dominated by resource companies, small- and mid-sized oil producers, construction and real estate developers, and medium-sized businesses and retail giants that fight unions and higher wages much more aggressively than the larger corporations that tend to gravitate towards the Liberal Party.
These corporate players will be looking to a Poilievre government for the sorts of policies Stephen Harper’s Conservatives implemented: slashing corporate taxes, undermining labour rights, limiting access to social assistance, scrapping environmental regulations, and furthering economic and military integration with the United States.
Hardly the policies that would serve the working Canadians Poilievre described in his convention speech.
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Excellent article!
Read Stephen Harper’s record as Prime Minister and then ask yourself, Who in their right mind would vote Conservative unless you’re a millionaire?
Hopefully Jagmeet Singh will maintain the NDP’s supply-and-confidence agreement with the federal Liberals.
Such minority governments are likely the closest that Canadians will get to fully democratic proportional representative governance.
Quite unlike our seemingly entrenched FPTP ballot, PR is genuinely democratic, regardless of political ideology.
FPTP does seem to serve corporate lobbyists well, however. I believe it is why such powerful interests generally resist attempts at changing from FPTP to proportional representation electoral systems of governance, the latter which dilutes corporate influence.
Low-representation FPTP-elected governments, in which a relatively small portion of the country’s populace is actually electorally represented, are likely the easiest for lobbyists to manipulate or ‘buy’.
It’s helping the biggest of businesses get unaccountably even bigger, defying the very spirit of government rules established to ensure healthy competition by limiting mass consolidation. …
Currently, corporate lobbyists can actually write bills for our (Canada’s) governing representatives to vote for, albeit perhaps with some amendments, and have implemented, supposedly to save the elected officials their own time.
I believe the practice has become so systematic here that those who are aware of it (that likely includes mainstream news-media political writers) don’t bother publicly discussing it. …
As far as Canadian ‘democracy’ goes: to truly have it, there first needs to be a truly democratic electoral system.
Then again, according to ‘Calamity’ Jane Bodine — a retired political consultant hired by an unpopular politician to help him win the Bolivian presidential election — in the film Our Brand Is Crisis: “If voting changed anything, they’d have made it illegal.”
well i have been voting conservative for a long time never voted liberals against my fathers sujestion but he always said to me its your choice
bla bla now i never voted liberal always conservative but now im tired of being lied
Thank you for telling the truth. My hope and prayer is that it will spread widely across our country!
You want to know about the cost of corperate greed in this country or the effects of bad faith unions in labour negotiations when people are injured on the job at unsafe horrible jobs where lives simply are of no consequence? Or perhaps the failed govt management of social housing in this country where social nets are merely there to benefit those working in these organizations and not to provide stable safe affordable housing for the people who need it! I am 55 was permanently injured at a part time job working at a Loblaws trying to make ends meet as an already permanently disabled person my spine was injured at work due to severe safety concerns that both Loblw’s, Local 247 and WCB refused to acknoweledge despite dozens of complaints tgat fell on deaf ears! Now I am even more permanently injured with no compensation, no medicine, no treatment and my healthcare provider refused to help me and infact is playing a major role protecting Loblaws from liabilty of this! My govt housing provider destroyed what little dignity I had left by deliberately causing several life threatening pest infestations in my home to deny liabity of the atrocious conditions of the subsidized property where I lived since 2006 and has designs of redeveloping my property which was built in 1970s by refusing to adequately repair or maintain it and the processed that are in place meant to protect folks like me ie: tenancy branch and govt and municiple bylaws are denying its even taking place by controlling and funding all the non profit legal resources meant to help us in the eevent of these things taking place! My life is expendable! Theyve even stolen my private pension from local 1611 where I worked hard for over 16 years by underfunding it! I am not alone!
Disgusting that this ego maniac has risen to where he is today. Thanks for keeping up the fight to save our democracy.