“…lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Attribution:
Disraeli, Labouchиre, or Courtney

Today- "Norman Spector told the Commons ethics committee that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has done nothing to limit the power of lobbyists despite promises to clean up government."

I was reading a recent column by Norman Spector and this little paragraph caught my eye:

Globe and MailDec. 10, 2007 “One thing has changed since Mr. Schreiber finally gave up on the Bear Head project in the mid-1990s. At that time, at the end of the Mulroney era, Canada was rated the 5th least corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International. Most recently, we were ranked 14th. Some of that decline is no doubt due to the proliferation of lobbyists. “

After decades (1975-1996) of experience as one of our high-level civil servants he has made a statement regarding the cause of a drop in our rank in the least corrupt countries of the world index.Is he on to something? There may be some coincidences or strong relationships in the following columns of numbers vs. Canada’s Rank but, truth be told, I wouldn’t know an anova from a canola:

Year Rank #of all consultant Inhouse Inhouse
Lobbyists lobbyists corpLobb OrgLobb
1996 5 2673 1793 397 483
1997 5 3856 2376 745 735
1998 6 4428 2756 757 915
1999 5 4634 2857 759 1018
2000 5 4959 3208 695 1056
2001 7 5157 3613 609 935
2002 7 5222 3804 572 846
2003 11 5334 3826 603 905
2004 12 5523 4152 604 767
2005 14 7933 6267 764 902
2006 14 9502 7625 770 1103
Corr.* 0.85 0.89 0.22 0.26

It would appear that the largest drop in our ranking by Transparency International occurred between 2002 and 2005 for the time period of 1996 to 2006. This would be late Chretian-Martin.

Numbers are taken from T.I Corruption Index and the Canadian registry of lobbyists. Data prior to 1996 is not available.
*Correlation is between rank and the following columns.
P.s.- I hope the format comes out:
Year/Rank/#of all lobbists/Consultant lobbyists/Inhouse Corp. lobbyists/Inhouse Org Lobbyists

[LIST][/LIST]

[ 05 February 2008: Message edited by: Stanley10 ]

[ 05 February 2008: Message edited by: Stanley10 ]