Usage and abusage

If you listen to the grisly display of misinformation, ignorance, and borderline insanity that is the open line shows at their worst — and that's usually the way they're at — you will learn the following "facts" about lobbying and lobbyists:

• newspapers like the National Post or Toronto Star use their pages to lobby the federal government for stuff.
• the federal government lobbies, or hires lobbyists, or is comprised of lobbyists.
• the provincial government lobbies, or hires lobbyists, or is comprised of lobbyists.
• MHAs and MPs are lobbyists.
• Jane Doe, in writing to a government official in her own capacity and on her own behalf, is lobbying.
• private businesses are lobbied to do or not do stuff.

It makes you want to hunt down whoever introduced the verb "to lobby" into the local parlance... and cut his tongue out so he can't do something similar ever, ever again.

The latest entry into the ever-growing We Really Don't Know What We're Talking About When We Use The Word "Lobbyist" club — and boy, this will come as a shocker! — is the Newfoundland Weekly Separatist.

Yip, Scrunchins, in the pages of The Independent, this week informs its readers (both of 'em - ed.) that:

... last week Scrunchins took a swipe at local bloggers Sue Kelland-Dyer, Ed Hollett, Simon Lono and Geoff Meeker. The four have much in common: they're opinionated, somewhat in the public eye, and each has a day job as a communications consultant, meaning they're paid to lobby and advise.

Advise? Yeah, that's what communications consultants do, or any type of consultants, for that matter.

But lobby?

No, Ryan, that's what lobbyists do.

A lobbyist, you see, is someone, outside of government, who is hired on behalf of someone else, and works on their behalf, to advance a political or public-policy goal through persuasive tactics meant to induce a legislative body or a bureaucracy to take a particular action, or to refrain from taking one.

Lobbying is a peculiar profession, and, in recent years, has attracted sufficient concern about ethics and propriety that most jurisdictions now regulate the industry.

And here's the thing: had Scrunchins bothered to do so, Scrunchins would have found that none of the four named individuals turns up in a search of either the provincial or federal lobbyists registry.

So, if its assertion is true, the Newfoundland Weekly Separatist has unwittingly uncovered a scandal involving lobbyists lobbying while not registered, which is contrary to federal or provincial statute (or both, if they are active in both arenas).

But if it isn't true?