OTTAWA — The federal lobbying watchdog says former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer and his business partner broke the Lobbyists’ Code of Conduct.
Lobbying commissioner Karen Shepherd says Jaffer and Patrick Glemaud should have been registered as lobbyists when they contacted and met several government officials and Tory politicians about work their firm was doing.
Of 10 complaints she received about the activities of the two men, she found five were well-founded.
Her findings centred around Jaffer and Glemaud’s failure to register as in-house lobbyists before they began approaching government officials about environmental projects.
The pair had formed a company called Green Power Generation Corp., and were in talks with various companies about the kinds of federal funding they might be able to obtain.
“They were clearly employed by a company which was in the business of making money. They were the only two employees, so they had an expectation of benefiting in the future,” Shepherd said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
“They were communicating and trying to obtain more than $178 million in government funding, which is a registerable activity under the act. So it was significant in terms of the time spent on submitting the proposals, there was communication, there was follow-up, and it was also an important component of their business model in terms of obtaining this funding, so I determined even on that nature it was quite significant.”
The details of the contact with government officials emerged in April 2010 after it was revealed Jaffer had been in business talks with a controversial Toronto businessman.
Jaffer’s wife, former junior cabinet minister Helena Guergis, was removed from the Conservative cabinet over allegations she had been helping to lend her husband’s dealings an aura of connectedness.
The matter was referred to the RCMP, but that investigation was dropped and no charges were ever laid. The conflict-of-interest and ethics commissioner, meanwhile, did find in July that Guergis had broken the rules when she wrote to municipal officials in her riding to promote a project with which Jaffer had also been involved.
But the question of whether Jaffer and Glemaud were engaged in illegal lobbying was the last element to be resolved.
Jaffer contacted at least six different ministerial offices, and was able to have meetings arranged to discuss different renewable energy projects the he was working on with Green Power Generation Corp. A biography he originally had on a personal website, which he later took down, spoke about his business expertise and ability to “secure support from the Canadian government.”
Internal government documents tabled with a Commons committee showed that far from being treated as a pariah by government officials, he was instead treated as a priority. At the Public Works Department, bureaucrats were pushed to hurry up a meeting between officials and Jaffer on a solar panel project.
There has never been any indication Jaffer and Glemaud ever received any federal funding. The two have maintained that they were simply seeking information about different government funding envelopes. The Lobbying Act exempts simple queries about programs and their terms and conditions.
“My whole social network comes from almost 12 years of being an MP,” Jaffer told the government operations committee in June 2010.
“Of course I’m going to have interactions with people, but because my wife was a cabinet minister and because I understood the laws, I wasn’t going to break any confidence by trying to lobby people who would be put in an awkward situation.”
But one of Jaffer’s former business associates, Nazim Gillani, produced a contract at a Commons committee signed by him and Glemaud that indicated an agreement had been reached for Green Power Generation to pursue federal funding for different projects. Gillani said he never thought this constituted lobbying.
Two other businessmen who had contact with Jaffer also said they never specifically discussed Jaffer lobbying for their firms, although Jaffer did send along details of their products to government officials.
Shepherd emphasized that whether or not Jaffer and Glemaud were successful at obtaining grants, contributions or financial benefits didn’t make a difference to their duty to register.
“Registration is a requirement even if the desired outcome isn’t achieved, an individual registration might be required even if the lobbyist wasn’t engaged to specifically perform lobbying activity, and again registration may be required even if his business or organization doesn’t make any money,” Shepherd said.
Neither Jaffer nor Glemaud were immediately available for comment.