While administrative failures are multiplying within the federal public service, the Trudeau government is resorting more than ever to the services of the American consulting firm McKinsey.
According to data from Public Services and Procurement Canada, the Liberal government has spent 30 times more in seven years than the Harper government in nine years, a total of $66 million, an amount that is increasing year on year, reported Radio- Canada. Added to this are contracts worth $84 million, which federal public bodies awarded to McKinsey in just 18 months, between March 2021 and last November, according to a written government response to a question from Conservative MP Tako Van. Popta.
Business relations between the Trudeau government and the consulting firm took off after McKinsey’s world number one, Dominic Barton, was given the mandate in 2016 to chair an advisory committee on economic development. According to Globe and Mail, McKinsey provided free services to support the work of this committee, whose key recommendation was to increase to 450,000, or 50% more, the number of immigrants admitted by Canada annually. The Trudeau government has even taken things a step further by adopting a target of 500,000 new permanent residents starting in 2025.
McKinsey’s alleged generosity paid off as juicy federal contracts, typically awarded without competitive bidding, began to fall into the firm’s hands. As the Toronto daily revealed last year, she has won contracts worth $24.8 million from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to design “transformation” strategies for that department. The big deal: his boss convinces the government to adopt a new immigration policy that can easily be described as extreme, and the firm that Dominic Barton has just left begins to sign contracts to carry out this transformation.
McKinsey has a reputation for infiltrating the organizations it advises, whether governments or large private corporations, and making itself indispensable. It is thus able to confidentially collect information that strengthens its transnational expertise. This sprawling strategy seems to have worked wonderfully with the Trudeau government as well as, on the other side of the Atlantic, with the Macron government.
What is striking about the contracts awarded by the Trudeau government to McKinsey is their number and scope, so much so that one wonders if the senior federal public service and the political class have abdicated some of their responsibilities. It is certainly not up to McKinsey to design Canadian immigration policy, a policy that should and must have been debated democratically, and not determined by a private firm, however shrewd it may be. And we are still waiting for the effects of his magic wand on IRCC, which is still distinguished by its lamentable management.
The Legault government has also called on McKinsey’s services, but for a much more modest sum and for one-off needs: 1.7 million for advice on mass vaccination and 4.9 million to help it develop its recovery plan. revival of the economy.
In France, a Senate committee looked into the contracts allocated by the State to consulting firms, including McKinsey which, moreover, is the subject of an investigation relating to the financing of the electoral campaign of the party La République on the march – Rebirth of Emmanuel Macron. The Senate committee concluded that firms like McKinsey have intervened in the major reforms of the five-year term, “strengthening their place in public decision-making”.
In Canada, such a review of all contracts awarded by the Trudeau government to McKinsey is required, an exercise that a House of Commons committee could undertake. In Quebec, it is the Auditor General who could dissect the contracts concluded without a call for tenders with the American consulting firm. Elected officials and the general population are entitled to know the precise nature of the mandates entrusted to the firm as well as the conclusions and results to which they have led.
For an organization, the use of the services of external strategic consultants such as McKinsey can sometimes be justified on an ad hoc basis when a different perspective or in-depth expertise is needed. But this expensively paid advice cannot replace internal expertise or the political responsibility to define the orientations of a government and its programs.