Ontario’s integrity commissioner has found that Premier Doug Ford’s longtime right-hand man broke provincial lobbying law.
In summarizing its findings of Amin Massoudi’s “non-compliance” with the Lobbyists Registration Act, the commissioner’s office said he failed to register as a lobbyist for a client after lobbying “a public office holder” in a 2023 telephone call.
The integrity commissioner found that he also placed that person “in a position of potential conflict of interest during that communication, because Mr. Massoudi had offered that same public office holder a ticket to a Toronto Raptors basketball game the previous day,” the Integrity Commissioner’s Office said in a public posting.
Massoudi served as the premier’s principal secretary and left that position in 2022 to found the lobbying firm Atlas Strategic Advisors.
On Thursday, Massoudi told The Trillium that the phone call that the commissioner cited was with a mid-level minister’s office staff member in January of 2023.
“During that conversation, a topic related to an economic development file came up,” he said in an emailed statement. “I immediately informed the staff member that I was not registered on the file and indicated that a colleague, who was appropriately registered, would follow up. At the time, I believed this to be the appropriate way to handle the situation.”
“This experience has been an invaluable learning opportunity,” he continued. “I take compliance with all relevant legislation extremely seriously. Over the last two years, I have taken concrete steps to strengthen internal compliance protocols and ensure nothing like this happens again. These steps include holding regular compliance meetings, maintaining ongoing dialogue with the Office of the Integrity Commissioner, and retaining external legal counsel to advise on and support a rigorous compliance framework.”
Massoudi’s and Ford’s shared history dates back at least a decade and a half. Massoudi worked for both Doug and Rob Ford during the stint they sat together on Toronto city council. From 2010 to 2014, Rob was mayor and Doug was a councillor for Etobicoke.
Massoudi’s first foray into lobbying was between then and when Doug Ford entered provincial politics in 2018. That year, he helped Ford and his Progressive Conservatives get elected and then joined the premier’s office, which he worked in for Ford’s first term and the first few months of his second before leaving to run his own lobbying and consulting firm.
For most of his time working in the premier’s office, Massoudi held the position of principal secretary. In the role, he was Ford’s second-ranked staffer and seen as a key gatekeeper of access to the premier.
Massoudi left his position in the premier’s office a few months after the June 2022 election. Around the same time, in late August, his company adopted its current moniker: Atlas Strategic Advisors, business records show.
Also around then, his company was contracted by PC Caucus Services — a taxpayer-funded office within the Legislative Assembly of Ontario that helps the government — to continue providing “communications support” and speechwriting services, a spokesperson for Ford’s office previously said. Government spending information released later by the province showed Atlas was paid $237,000 for this work in 2022-23.
Within months of leaving his job as Ford’s principal secretary, Massoudi’s business had attracted the attention of the office overseeing lobbying of the provincial government, which The Trillium exclusively reported in June 2023.
“Based on what we believe is an untrue complaint, the Integrity Commissioner is looking into a matter involving our firm,” Massoudi said in an email on June 13, 2023.
Since then, he’s been a part of a couple of controversies that have nagged the Ford government.
Massoudi was part of the infamous Las Vegas trip involving a would-be Greenbelt developer. The early 2020 Vegas trip and the inaccurate testimonies Massoudi and others gave to the integrity commissioner’s office during its Greenbelt investigation, both of which were first reported by The Trillium in 2023, contributed to Ford’s PCs’ decision to backpedal from their land removals.
Since fall 2023, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been investigating whether there was a criminal element behind the Greenbelt removals. No charges have been laid as a result of the investigation so far.
Atlas Strategic Advisors was also the firm Brighton councillors publicly touted hiring to “work the backroom” with a provincial government that “sometimes talks to its friends more than other folks” to try to secure funding it needed to upgrade its water systems. Massoudi pulled his firm out of its $10,000 per-month contract with the municipality just before the town’s controversy spilled over to Queen’s Park.
Massoudi is the sixth person the integrity commissioner’s office has revealed publicly to have broken Ontario’s lobbying law in the last year. Those six represent half of the total times the commissioner’s office has imposed its naming-and-shaming penalty since it was empowered to investigate lobbyists in 2016.
Publicizing that it found someone broke the Lobbyists Registration Act is one of the few penalties the integrity commissioner’s office can issue against a lobbyist. The more serious penalty the law currently allows is a suspension from lobbying of up to two years.
The commissioner’s office imposed that penalty on the lobbyist it had dubbed in its Greenbelt report as “Mr. X” for contravening the law in several instances, including his work to secure land removals. Three others who the office has recently found to have broken the province’s lobbying law also did so in work leading to Greenbelt removals.
While thousands of lobbying registrations are filed annually, the commissioner’s office has only launched about 15 lobbyist investigations yearly since law changes gave it the ability in 2016, according to its annual reports. The Lobbyists Registration Act also significantly limits what the office is allowed to disclose about its investigations and findings.
—With files from Jessica Smith Cross
