They’re two guys from Ottawa. They work from home. They are not experts in anything. Depending on the needs of their clients, they simply call subcontractors.
The government wanted an app that could monitor border crossings. Without touching anything themselves, they had it designed. The public knows the application by its name: ArriveCan.
The costs billed to the government by the various private offices involved in ArriveCan have so far been approximately $54 million. It all started with a project initially valued at $80,000…
Is it possible to believe that the State would have been better advised to produce itself, internally, such a simple thing? This unbridled subcontracting perfectly reveals the meager means granted to the State in recent years. By dint of seeing itself butchered, the State ended up freeing itself from the means of properly ensuring its primary responsibility: public service.
There are those in the opposition who rightly accuse the management of the Trudeau government. You still have to find something to look beyond the end of your nose. All the same, it’s not as if, among the conservatives in particular, the state apparatus hadn’t already been trampled on as well, with a promise to do even better in this same direction at the first opportunity. This generalized war waged against public services reflects the strange contempt of today’s major parties for the defense of institutions that guarantee the common interest.
On the Quebec side, the situation is no better. Under Éric Caire’s ministry, for example, the state’s autonomy in IT matters continued to deteriorate. In 2018, when the national-conservatism of the CAQ came to power, about 28% of the functions necessary for the proper functioning of the state apparatus were provided externally. The Journal of Montreal reports that nearly 33% of all operations are now outsourced. In major ministries, such as that of Justice and Transport, the functions entrusted externally are of the order of 45 to 50%. For autonomy and independence, please come back!
Minister Caire, the man who claims to be ready to fight to “his last drop of blood” to defend the third link, leaves the state bloodless. He had however repeated, when he sat in opposition, that the external resources were far too important. Under his watch, things just got worse. More than 1,100 vacancies continue to be vacant.
For forty years, the State has remained hanging upside down, subjected to the butchery of the great neoliberal knives. Its carcass now takes on the appearance of a feeder where all the large private birds come to peck.
Thus we have better understood, in recent days, that it is not only for the management of the pandemic that the government has called on the American multinational McKinsey. Hydro-Québec, reports the excellent journalist Thomas Gerbet, also called on her for advice on the management of its dams. However, the state corporation has its own analysts, reputed to be among the best. Still, $38 million has gone to McKinsey since 2016. In some cases, these contracts were awarded to McKinsey without a call for tenders, as was also the case in the past at the Caisse de dépôt.
These millions granted to McKinsey, retorts Hydro-Québec, are only shots compared to its operating budget. Is the Crown corporation aware that such shots, taken from the public domain, could very well be appreciated elsewhere, for example in the education network?
Two reporters from New York Times have just devoted a long investigation to McKinsey. In their book, When McKinsey Comes to Town, they recall the hunting list of this firm of expertise experts. It is about his way of spotting and encouraging doctors inclined to inflate the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. There is also mention of McKinsey’s commitments to autocratic governments, then of her generous advice lavished on tobacco companies, of the role she also played, at the American border, in the establishment of measures for the separation of immigrant families.
McKinsey’s advice, the two journalists note, follows the hard line of liberalism promoted by the ideologue Milton Friedman, while denying it to act in a socially responsible manner. On the jobs front, the two reporters argue, there’s a real possibility that McKinsey “will be a bigger legitimator of mass layoffs than anyone, anywhere, and anytime in the world.” modern history”. In The Atlantica Yale professor, Daniel Markovits, has also worked to demonstrate how McKinsey’s approaches had the effect of destroying the middle class and increasing the gap between rich and poor.
Since the company does not identify its clients or disclose the advice it gives, people are often unaware of McKinsey’s heavy influence on their social conditions. However, almost everywhere in the world, McKinsey imposes its views on health care, on the structure of the education system and on energy management. In Ontario, the province that François Legault follows like the North Star, McKinsey has been called in by Doug Ford at a time of increasing privatization of the education system.
It is true that McKinsey knows how to recruit personalities capable of dangling its carnivorous approaches. Who remembers that Dominique Anglade worked for years for McKinsey, before becoming the president of the CAQ, then becoming the head of the Liberal Party?