Who lobbies Trudeau’s cabinet the most?

In today’s Big Story podcast, lobbying is a tricky part of politics. It can be tricky to define, tricky to identify and really, really tough to analyze at scale. That’s because of how it’s tracked — across several different databases, with no standards, no searchability and often completely different spellings of the businesses, organizations and politicians involved.

But a new data journalism project has tried to overcome that, and put everything we know about lobbying the highest levels of government in one place, so the public can see (and search) for themselves. And once they do that, you can answer the real questions: Who gets the most facetime with the most powerful people in the country, and what are they talking about?

Roberto Rocha, data journalist with the Investigative Journalism Foundation, joins The Big Story.

“When lobbyists register for lobbying, they have to declare what their intended outcomes are. But every time a lobbyist actually meets with a government official, we don’t know what was discussed in that meeting.”

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