ASSIGNMENT
1. What is lobbying and who are the lobbyists?
Locate the list of the top 100 lobbyists in Ottawa in 2015 contained in the article in the Hill Times. This article contains a list of the top 100 lobbyists in Ottawa.
What is a lobbyist under the terms of the Federal Lobbying Act?
Build a data-set 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 data-set 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).

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:
• 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.
• To complete this assignments you are going to have to have some limited skill with Word tables or Excel or some other spreadsheet program.
• This isn’t an exercise in finding academic literature. There probably aren’t any academic papers written directly on this question you will be addressing. 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.