New Brunswick just wrote the country's toughest lobbying law. It isn't in force yet.

New Brunswick's Lobbyists' Registration Act hadn't been touched since 2014. On June 12, 2026, that changed — Bill 44 received Royal Assent, and once I read the actual amending text instead of the press release, it's clear this isn't a tune-up. It's a rebuild.

Three things change. First, registration stops being something you do eventually and becomes something you can't lobby without: the new Act says a consultant or in-house lobbyist "shall not lobby a public office holder unless…registered" — a flat prohibition the law has never carried before. Second, everyone registered owes a monthly return, due 15 days after the month ends, covering every communication with a public official that month — you get a pass in a quiet month, but five quiet months in a row and you owe a check-in return anyway. Third, the Integrity Commissioner gets real teeth: investigations on the Commissioner's own initiative, not just on complaint, administrative penalties set by regulation, the power to publish a violator's name, and a prohibition on lobbying for up to two years. A law firm bulletin called this, while it was still a bill, "Canada's most onerous lobbying disclosure law." Reading the amendments, I don't think that's overstated.

Here's the part the coverage I've seen skips. Read past the "shall not lobby unless registered" line to the Act's own commencement clause, and it says the whole thing — or any part of it — "comes into force on a day or days to be fixed by proclamation." No proclamation date has been set. None of this is law yet. When the bill was still before the House, government's own estimate was that building the new registry and consulting with lobbyists before it takes effect would take about a year — and then a further year before the Commissioner actually starts enforcing it.

For a founder building in New Brunswick, or thinking about a file there, that's the useful fact, not the alarming one. You're not late. You have a real runway — plausibly into 2027 or beyond — to get the practice right before any of this checks your work: know when a conversation counts as lobbying, keep a running log of who you talked to and when, and build the monthly-return habit before a regulator can fine you for skipping it.

I'll update this the day a proclamation date actually lands. Until then, "New Brunswick lobbyists must register now" is premature — but the runway it's handing founders is the real story.

The federal and Ontario rules that already are in force work differently in ways that'll surprise you — I wrote up the contrasts in the Lobbying Act for founders.

And if you're weighing a file that touches New Brunswick or any other province, talk to me before you assume the rules are settled — book a scoping call and I'll tell you what's actually live versus what's still coming.