You must complete ONE of the FIRST TWO (1,2) of the following research assignments for February 10 and ONE of the SECOND TWO (3,4) for March 23. The second set of 2 questions will be available in the coming weeks.
The purpose of this assignment is to have you do some real research on important political questions of the day using sources of information that researchers on Canadian politics use frequently. For each of the assignments make sure that you:
• Explain why the question you are researching is important.
• Properly reference where the data came from in a manner that would allow a reader to find the exact same places should they choose to verify your figures. Do not use Wikipedia data or references or other secondary sources that do not seem authoritative or primary.
• Tell the reader what the data is telling you and why? You can use graphs or tables to help you do this.
• Tell the reader what you would do to further investigate the question given more time and resources.
• Include the data table you have built as an appendix to the paper. For question 4 the data table will be too big to print so you will have to email it to your TA clearly marked as yours.
• To complete these assignments you are going to have to have some limited skill with Word tables or Excel or some other spreadsheet program (for you Apple devotees). If you haven’t learned these skills, they will be very useful in research and life. The course director will help you with this in class but there are many help sources on Youtube and elsewhere.
• This isn’t an exercise in finding academic literature. There probably aren’t any academic papers written directly on the questions you will be addressing below. In fact some of the research you will be producing is completely original. However, there may be academic articles on similar or related questions and you should look for it to help with your interpretation of the data.
1. What is lobbying and who are the lobbyists?
Locate the list of the top 100 lobbyists in Ottawa in 2014 contained in the article in the Hill Times included in the course reading list. This article contains a list of the top 100 lobbyists in Ottawa and is accessible through the Library eresources.
What is a lobbyist under the terms of the Federal Lobbying Act?
Build a dataset that includes the following information for each of the 100 lobbyists: gender, political party affiliation or connection, former party position, former elected position and one other characteristic or variable that is mentioned for most of the lobbyists and you think is important. Once you have the dataset built, summarize your findings in percentages. Describe where the data came from. Discuss your findings and what they mean and why you think they are important. How far can you generalize your findings? If you had unlimited time and money what would you do to broaden the study of this question and why?
To better understand the information in the list and your data table, you should look at the lobbyist register and lobbyist legislation on the site of the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada.
Properly reference where you found the information.
Submit your data table with the essay (not included in the page count). You can use the table below as a template.
Name gender Lobby affil firm Party affil party position
André Albinati m Earnscliffe Strategy Group gov rel Lib staffer
David Angus m Capital Hill Group gov rel
2. Newspaper reporting on Government Bills introduced and passed in the House of Commons.
The point of this exercise is to see how much of the legislation debated and passed in the House of Commons is discussed in the Globe and Mail. Canadians will not be informed and capable of participating in democratic debates if the media does not tell them about what is taking place.
Go to the Parliament of Canada website. Find the list of Bills introduced by the Government in the Second Session of the 41st Parliament, (the last parliamentary session of the defeated Harper government). Make a list of the numbers of the bills (ie. C2, C3) and the short titles of the bills (i.e., Senate Reform Act) and the status of the Bill (the last or most recent stage completed in the path to Royal Assent). You should keep track of this in a Word or Excel table. Once you have the list compiled, access the Globe and Mail through the Library’s eresources, set the date for search to coincide with the dates for the Second Session of the 41st Parliament and search for any mention of the legislation using the bills number and or the short title of the bill. Report the number of pieces of legislation that had any mention on the Globe and Mail over this period. There may be good reasons why some Bills are not mentioned, perhaps they a routine matters. Is there one or more piece of legislation that you think should have been discussed in the paper but was not?
Describe your research process, where the information came from and how you selected it.
Spend some time reading the Parliament of Canada website to help you understand what happens to a bill once it is introduced.
What do your findings tell us about how one newspaper reports on the workings of our democracy? If the paper wasn’t reporting on the business of Parliament how would you characterize the balance of their political reporting? How far can you generalize your findings? If you had unlimited time and money what would you do to broaden the study of this question and why?
Submit your data table with the essay (not included in the page count). You can use the table below as a template.
Bill number Short Title Status Date/dates of mention in Globe Comments
C7 Senate Reform Act Introduction and First Reading
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