New publication reveals extent of alcohol industry lobbying in Canada

A recent publication by researchers at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research has shed light on alcohol industry lobbying of Canada’s federal government.

“Alcohol and its health impacts have been making headlines more often in recent years, but we haven’t seen meaningful policy decisions that could protect public health, including things like warning labels, adopting the 2023 Canadian Guidance on Alcohol and Health, or keeping alcohol excise taxes in line with inflation,” says CISUR director Tim Naimi, one of the study’s authors. “The extensive lobbying of government officials by the alcohol industry is likely one of those reasons."

The paper, published in Health Promotion International, examined lobbyist registrations in the Canadian Federal Registry of Lobbyists between May 2022 and May 2023, a time when all three of the above policy decisions were being considered by government. Researchers classified lobbyists as to whether they represented the alcohol industry or a non-industry public health group. The number of meetings and who lobbyists met with during that time was recorded.

The analysis found that the alcohol industry accounted for 71% of all meetings recorded in the registry, with 13 alcohol industry organizations registered as lobbyists versus four for public health. Of the four registered public health organizations, one organization accounted for 95% of the meetings and one recorded zero meetings. Additionally, the alcohol industry was more likely to meet with non-elected government officials, such as senior policy officials and chiefs of staff.

“When it comes to promoting wellbeing with respect to alcohol at the federal level, organizations and individuals concerned with public health are utterly and comprehensively outgunned by the alcohol industry,” says Ashley Wettlaufer, another study co-author and research affiliate at CISUR.

There were limitations to estimating lobbying activity using the publicly available lobbying registry. For example, the public lobbying registry does not capture unscheduled or after-hours lobbying activity, such as evening receptions or spontaneous phone calls. Furthermore, the few public health organizations logged in the lobby registry are concerned with a range of other health topics besides alcohol, whereas the industry groups assessed are all focused on alcohol and did not include other entities that might lobby around alcohol, such as restaurant associations. Those who lobby less than 20 percent of their time, including former government officials, aren’t required to register as lobbyists so don’t show up in the official statistics.

“Even with these disparities between the alcohol industry and public health we saw looking at the registry data, this study likely under-estimates the outsized lobbying power, and therefore influence, of the alcohol industry,” says Naimi. “The bottom line is that the health and welfare concerns of Canadian citizens is not getting a fair shake.”

Read “Alcohol lobbying in Canada: a quantitative analysis of the federal registry of lobbyists”

Media contact: Amanda Farrell-Low, Communications Officer, Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research.