The Influence Firewall
A plan to clean up City Hall
If you bankrolled a politician, you shouldn’t get to lobby them.
Too often, the people who get City Hall’s attention aren’t the residents who pay for it. They’re the insiders who bankrolled a campaign and then came back to collect. That’s not how a city should work. It’s how a city stops working.
Alex Lawson’s platform is a simple rule: a four-year firewall between campaign support and lobbying. If you backed a campaign, you shouldn’t get to turn around and lobby the official you helped elect.
The rule
If you donated to a campaign, worked on it for pay, held a contract with it, or volunteered in an organized capacity, you would be barred from lobbying that official on behalf of clients for four years, the full term of council. The City can do this on its own by amending Ottawa’s Lobbyist Registry By-law (No. 2012-309). It needs no new law from the province, no new department, and no new spending.
It costs nothing, because the office already exists
Ottawa already has a Lobbyist Registry and an Integrity Commissioner who runs it. Right now, the only cooling-off rule covers officials who leave City Hall. There’s no rule at all on the money and labour that put officials there in the first place. This plank closes that gap, enforced by the office we already pay for.
What it doesn’t touch
This is for the people selling access, not the people who live here. If you call your councillor about your own street, your own permit, or a problem in your neighbourhood, you’re not a lobbyist and you never have been. That stays exactly as it is.
Leading by example
Alex won’t ask you to take his word for it. His campaign will publish its supporter list against the lobbying registry and hold itself to the four-year firewall, whether or not the rule has passed. As mayor, he would bring the by-law to council within his first 100 days.
We need to change whose voices are heard at City Hall.
Ottawa deserves better.