Dave Forestell joined the Toronto-headquartered multinational last month as its director of government relations. He was a policy adviser and staff director at the PMO from 2009 to 2012 before moving to Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver’s (Eglinton-Lawrence, Ont.) office in 2012 as chief of staff, his LinkedIn profile says
In July, he moved to the Conservative Party headquarters in the role of senior adviser to the leader, and joined Barrick Jan. 13.
Mr. Forestell joins a growing list of former Conservative staffers and MPs who have recently moved from public office into the government relations world, including former MPs Ted Menzies, Merv Tweed, and Vic Toews.
“We are pleased to have someone with a strong public policy background joining our team,” Barrick spokesperson Andy Lloyd said in an emailed statement. “The Office of the Ethics Commissioner cleared Dave to work at the company and Barrick complies with all accountability, transparency and disclosure obligations.”
As a former designated public office holder under the Lobbying Act, Mr. Forestell is subject to a five-year post-employment prohibition on lobbying. However, the act only applies to in-house corporate lobbyists whose lobbying activity—including preparation time and travel—represents more than 20 per cent of their work. This means lobbyists at corporations can lobby up to that threshold without registering and without being subject to the five-year “cooling-off” period.
The Conflict of Interest Act prohibits former reporting public office holders—a category that includes Cabinet ministers and their staffers—from “accepting an offer of employment with an entity with which they had direct and significant official dealings during their last year in office.”
Mr. Forestell was lobbied 242 times during his four years as a Conservative staffer, the federal Lobbyists Registry shows, but never by Barrick. The firm didn’t report any meetings with the Department of Natural Resources while he was working in Mr. Oliver’s office, either.
Barrick reported three communications with officials in the Prime Minister’s Office while Mr. Forestell was there, but he wasn’t listed in the reports.
Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson examined those communications because of former PMO chief of staff Nigel Wright’s personal ties to Barrick founder and chairman Peter Munk and his son, Anthony. Ms. Dawson ended her examination satisfied that there hadn’t been an ethical breach.
The Conflict of Interest Act’s post-employment rules will prohibit Mr. Forestell from making representations to his former department for one year from the time he left Mr. Oliver’s office.
Another senior Conservative staffer also recently left public office to work for a mining firm. Adam Blinick, former deputy chief of staff and policy director to Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney (Lévis-Bellechasse, Que.), left his position in November to become Teck Resources’ senior adviser for logistics, The Lobby Monitor reported. Mr. Blinick previously served as policy director for Denis Lebel (Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean, Que.) when he was transport minister, and also worked as a special adviser in the PMO, his LinkedIn profile says.
Mr. Blinick was lobbied five times by Teck when he was at the transport minister’s office, the federal lobbyist registry shows, the most recent communication reported on Nov. 20, 2012.
A Teck spokesperson told The Lobby Monitor in November the company would comply with the Lobbying Act’s post-employment prohibitions.
The Toronto Star reported in September that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s (Whitby-Oshawa, Ont.) chief of staff, Kevin McCarthy, was moving to Scotiabank in November to become a director in its Canadian banking unit. Scotiabank lobbied Mr. McCarthy in April 2012.
Some elected officials have also recently left office to take government relations positions. Former Harper Cabinet minister Ted Menzies resigned his seat in Parliament in November to become president and CEO of agricultural industry association CropLife Canada. Former Conservative MP Merv Tweed resigned in the summer to take a position with OmniTRAX, a railway management company that had lobbied him in 2012.
Former Public Safety minister Vic Toews is registered to lobby as a consultant lobbyist in Manitoba, and former Conservative minister Chuck Strahl resigned his position as chair of the Security Intelligence Review Committee on Jan. 24 after media reported he was lobbying the B.C. government for Enbridge.
The moves come as the House Ethics Committee prepares to table a report on its statutory review of the Conflict of Interest Act, which could happen as early as this week. The committee adopted the report at an in camera meeting in December but it wasn’t presented to Parliament before the House rose early for the Christmas break.
The Lobbying Act underwent a five-year statutory review in 2012. The government tabled its response to the House Ethics Committee’s report in September 2012 but has said it’s waiting on the Conflict of Interest Act review before moving ahead with any changes.
The Ethics Committee recommended removing the “significant part of duties” threshold in its report to Parliament on the Lobbying Act. In her testimony to the committee, Lobbying Commissioner Karen Shepherd also recommended removing the threshold, calling it “difficult to calculate and even more difficult to enforce.”
In his response to the committee, Treasury Board President Tony Clement (Parry Sound-Muskoka, Ont.) said the government would take note of the 20 per cent rule recommendation and continue to study it, whereas he said the government supported some of the other recommendations.
In November, as the House Ethics Committee was reviewing its draft report on the Conflict of Interest Act, NDP ethics critic Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay, Ont.) said at a Hill press conference that the Conservative government should “rediscover the spirit of 2006” and address the loopholes in accountability legislation, particularly those related to MPs’ post-employment.
It was in 2006 that Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) said the new Federal Accountability Act would “stop former ministers, ministerial staffers and senior public officials from using their insider connections to profit from public service.”
Mr. Angus said Mr. Tweed and Mr. Menzies showed that “people who are very close to the government actually just step out of government and suddenly are in positions where they could be in a position to lobby.”
The government must address the 20 per cent rule and clear up discrepancies between the two acts so the public can have confidence in the rules, he said.
“When you’re a very well-connected Cabinet minister, you don’t need to spend 20 per cent of your time [lobbying]. You just need to make that one phone call,” Mr. Angus told reporters.
The reviews are an opportunity “to mesh the acts” to address the Accountability Act’s shortfalls, he said.
Pollster Nik Nanos said the various cases of former MPs and staffers entering government relations can hit the Conservative brand, because the government was elected in 2006 largely on an accountability platform.
“They add up,” he said in an interview. “Think of it this way: here’s another attack ad ready-made for an opposition party interested in taking advantage of something like this—pictures of former Conservative Cabinet ministers and Parliamentarians and the types of things that they’re doing, and to imply that this is not desirable behaviour.”
He said he thinks the Conservatives will use the act reviews “to try to inoculate themselves” from opposition attacks in the next election campaign.
“They’re hoping that they can put something new in the window in order to try to manage the fallout from whatever may occur in the coming year.”
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com/
Author: MARK BURGESS
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