Former NDP MLA Will Have to Wait to Start Lobbying

A one-time NDP MLA has lost her bid for an exemption from B.C.’s two-year cooling-off period for former public office holders who make the jump to lobbying.

Michael Harvey, B.C.’s registrar of lobbyists, recently rejected Kelli Paddon’s application to be excused from the regulations so she could start advocating with the province on behalf of the non-profit Board Voice Society of BC.

Paddon served in the B.C. legislature from 2020 to 2024 and was the parliamentary secretary for gender equity for the last two years of her term. As a designated former public office holder, B.C. law requires her to wait until November 2026 to begin lobbying the province.

In March, she was announced as the new executive director of Board Voice, an umbrella organization for volunteer boards of community organizations offering social services.

Paddon applied to the registrar for an exemption from the last six months of the cooling-off period so she could advocate with the government in support of “the community organizations that citizens and government depend on to care for the most vulnerable,” according to Harvey’s May 13 decision.

But he found that allowing the exemption would offer a “private advantage” to Board Voice.

“The organization the applicant proposes to lobby for appears to be an umbrella organization for a number of organizations, many of which likely receive public funding,” Harvey wrote.

“The ‘private advantage’ in this case then would be that the applicant, leveraging their time in office, may be able to secure benefits for her organization and its members that might not be available to other organizations competing for the same public funding.”

The registrar said Paddon failed to prove that an exemption would be in the public interest.

He pointed out that she was a parliamentary secretary for a portfolio related to social services, and wanted to lobby for organizations in the same sector.

This, he wrote, was different from the case of Erin Seeley, who received an exemption from the cooling-off period to lobby on behalf of the YWCA Metro Vancouver after serving as senior vice-president of the B.C. Financial Services Authority and CEO of the Real Estate Council of British Columbia.

Harvey wrote that, unlike Paddon, Seeley “moved from the Ministry of Finance to a non-profit, and stated in their submissions they would be prepared to accept conditions on their lobbying efforts to prevent that applicant from lobbying in areas that applicant had worked previously.”

Paddon told the Investigative Journalism Foundation she wasn’t surprised by the decision.

When she is able to lobby later this year, she plans to focus on issues related to multi-year contracts and cost-of-living increases for funding of non-profit groups.

“Non-profits are the backbone of our communities, but if they can't plan strategically and if they can't stretch their dollars because they don't know what's happening 10 months from now, that's not the best use of public dollars,” Paddon said.