Juno News - January 22, 2023


A much-needed investigation of the Trudeau-McKinsey contracts


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

176.80206

Word count

502

Sentence count

27


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A House of Commons committee is investigating McKinsey and Company's growing contracts with the federal government. What are these contracts actually for, and why did the government hire them? And what is the impact of these contracts on the public service?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 It is good news that a House of Commons committee is going to be probing the question of McKinsey and Company's growing contracts with the federal government.
00:00:09.860 Now what's at issue here are concerns about reports that McKinsey and Company's contract value has vastly increased in recent years under the Trudeau Liberal government,
00:00:19.640 now mounting for about $100 million worth of contracts since Trudeau got into office. It was much smaller before he got into office.
00:00:27.080 So parliamentarians have a lot of questions. It's a good thing they're holding this inquiry.
00:00:32.200 Here are just a couple of the questions that I think Canadians need answered.
00:00:36.340 One of them is, what were these contracts actually for? What was being done for $100 million?
00:00:43.320 Now often you can go onto government websites and you can see RFPs, Request for Proposals, where they tell you exactly what's going on, what they want.
00:00:51.900 Often it'll involve some material good. We need you to supply office equipment for this department.
00:00:57.420 And it's pretty clear what's going on there. And then you can measure whether or not you are getting good value for that money that you spend.
00:01:04.760 What is the measurable impact of what McKinsey and Company was doing for the federal government?
00:01:09.060 We right now just don't know.
00:01:12.300 Now, another important question is, what is the extent of McKinsey's involvement in general with the government?
00:01:18.600 One Quebec politician likened what was going on with all of these contracts to McKinsey effectively running a shadow government within the public service.
00:01:27.580 Basically meaning they were almost calling the shots in government departments.
00:01:31.980 They had that much influence and power. And that's what these contracts basically allowed.
00:01:36.720 Is that accurate? That interpretation?
00:01:39.340 These questions should be probed. We have to look into those angles.
00:01:42.440 And very importantly, and this is really immaterial of McKinsey, this question would apply regardless of who the consultancy was and how many contracts there were.
00:01:52.720 What's the federal public service doing on these files?
00:01:56.820 When you bring in an outside consultant for something that is not a tangible thing, not like supplying office equipment,
00:02:02.700 but you're bringing them in to offer general consulting services, why couldn't the public service do that themselves?
00:02:09.560 Why did you even need to outsource that service?
00:02:13.080 We pay a whole lot of people, many thousands of people working in Ottawa to be federal bureaucrats.
00:02:19.420 Some of them are very well paid.
00:02:22.000 Do you mean to tell me and do they mean to tell us that they were unable to deliver these services themselves?
00:02:29.020 Because that would be a problem if so.
00:02:31.620 And if they are able to deliver those services, well, then why did we contract them out to McKinsey?
00:02:36.360 That's just a couple questions.
00:02:37.480 There are many more.
00:02:39.160 I think Canadians should be attentive to this issue and they should be making their own statements on social media,
00:02:44.160 pressuring their own representatives to say, yes, please pay attention to this inquiry.
00:02:48.460 We have questions.
00:02:49.520 We want answers.