UPDATED - So, about that five-year ban on senior OLO staffers ...

UPDATE: Scroll down for a jaw-dropping response from Treasury Board President Tony Clement. 

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Longtime readers may recall that when the issue first surfaced back in the spring of 2010, I successfully predicted that the government would one up a Rahim Jaffer-inspired Liberal opposition day motion to expand the existing lobby regulations to cover parliamentary secretaries, as well as ministers and senior civil servants, by bringing forward a counter proposal to add all MPs -- opposition and government alike -- to the Designated Public Office Holders list.

In fact, certain comments emanating from Conservative corners during the ensuing debate, including several from Day himself, led to me to speculate that the government might have another surprise in store for the opposition -- namely, that senior staffers might end up facing the same five-year post-employment restrictions that the party was angling to impose on parliamentary secretaries.

Which, of course, is exactly what happened: in August 2010, the government announced that the DPOH list would be expanded to include all parliamentarians -- Senate and House alike -- as well as "any position on the staff of the Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons or on the staff of the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, that is occupied by a person appointed pursuant to subsection 128(1) of the Public Service Employment Act."

At the time, then-Treasury Board President Stockwell Day, described the move as "good news for Canadian families, workers and small-business people," who, he averred, could now be "confident that their Parliament is fully accountable to them, and not to special interest groups."

According to a Liberal staffer, staff in then-Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff's office were initially very much under the impression that they, too, would soon be subject to the five-year post-employment ban.

"We took it very seriously," he recalls, with several senior staff going so far as to resign their posts before the new rules came into effect in order to "leave their short-term career options open."

Those who remained, he says, "assumed that we would be bound to honour the cooling-off period."

But when the new regulations came into force, "it turned out that it only applied to staff in the Leader of the Opposition's Office who were appointed or hired under the Public Service Employment Act, which was absolutely nobody in our office, and I imagine nobody in the current NDP office either."

An NDP caucus spokesperson confirms that, as far as he knows, no one in the current OLO was hired under the PSEA, thus bringing the current count of OLO staffers covered by the 2010 extension to a nice, round zero.

Was that the government's plan all along?

As noted above, Treasury Board is, as yet, silent on the issue.

But to go back, once again, to my May 2010 musings, I did wonder at the time whether it might be devilishly difficult, if not effectively impossible, to add OLO staff to the five-year ban list without snaring virtually all political staffers in the same regulatory dragnet -- including those in MPs and party research offices, who were almost certainly outside the intended scope of the government's otherwise admirably Machiavellian manoeuvre.  

In any case, we'll soon find out if the government intends to rectify the situation, either by re-amending the DPOH list to ensure it actually applies to OLO staffers, or removing the purely symbolic reference to s128(1) appointees. Alternately, they could just leave the existing line there as a cautionary tale for future regulation drafters.

Until then, stay tuned! 

UPDATE - This just in from the office of Treasury Board President Tony Clement, whose press secretary insists that the ban does too apply to senior OLO staffers, despite the fact that, as written, it simply does not: