True Patriot Love - Has Canada Outsourced Its Government to Consultants？

00:00:00.000 Canada has built an entire political culture around one strange assumption that elected

00:00:05.300 officials are somehow experts. They're not. The minister of health usually isn't a doctor. The

00:00:10.480 minister of defense often never served. The immigration minister may never have worked

00:00:14.880 the border. Yet somehow we pretend these people are qualified to manage multi-trillion dollar

00:00:20.620 systems because they won an election. So what happens? Quietly behind the scenes,

00:00:25.540 the country is increasingly being run by consultants. McKinsey, Deloitte, Accenture,

00:00:30.680 KPMG, outside experts writing policy, frameworks, restructuring departments,

00:00:36.220 building digital systems, even advising government on how government itself should function.

00:00:41.860 And maybe the real question isn't whether there are too many consultants. Maybe the real question

00:00:46.360 is whether there are not enough. Because if politicians are essentially temporary brand

00:00:52.420 ambassadors rotating through ministries they barely understand, then who actually has the

00:00:56.960 expertise to run a modern country? Career consultants, technocrats, specialists, data

00:01:03.000 analysts, former industry leaders? We're told consultants are the problem, but what if consultants

00:01:08.060 are actually the symptom? The symptom of a political system that increasingly rewards

00:01:12.820 optics over competence. This time on TPL Media, has Canada outsourced government because government

00:01:18.620 no longer knows how to govern itself or should experts, not politicians, play an even larger role in running the country?

00:01:30.840 Okay, the question is, is Ottawa outsourcing expertise, accountability, and even decision-making,

00:01:36.720 and do we even know what they're up to? Paul Micucci, thanks for having this discussion with me.

00:01:40.920 Yeah, thanks, Mike. Definitely.

00:01:43.780 Okay, the answer is yes.

00:01:45.460 So, consulting fees last year, $23.1 billion.

00:01:49.580 Yep.

00:01:50.240 $20 billion, right?

00:01:53.720 So, if you look at it.

00:01:54.540 That's pretty significant, yes.

00:01:55.560 Yeah, that's a lot, right?

00:01:57.080 So, really, what we've done is, whether it be systems, whether it be consulting, any major industry right now or ministry has a consulting team side by side with that minister or that bureaucratic team.

00:02:13.620 Now, for those of you, a lot of us know politics and we know politics in Canada was set up to basically the premise of parliamentary politics is to have the bureaucracy basically not fight, but to provide the tension against the government or the political people in the counterbalance, if you will.

00:02:33.820 Our counterbalance in parliamentary politics is supposed to be that.

00:02:37.620 And the state ongoing knowledge in the government is supposed to sit with the bureaucrats.

00:02:43.400 So they're supposed to be your ongoing mainstay.

00:02:45.800 So regardless of the policies of the government, which change off and on, there's supposed to be a counterbalance fight that maintains the state of the direction of the country for the good of the country.

00:02:59.180 And that's why the counterbalance between bureaucracy and politics exists.

00:03:03.820 Well, okay. So then you and I have this discussion, good or bad, indifferent. Well,

00:03:10.580 you know, what is $24 billion going out the door? And that was annually, I think you said,

00:03:16.140 is that correct?

00:03:17.140 Yeah, that's the annual number.

00:03:18.480 So over the course of the term of a government that hangs in for four years, you know, you're

00:03:23.300 looking at a pretty significant number there, you know?

00:03:27.260 Now can I add just a couple of things, Mike, on that? That doesn't include IT services.

00:03:31.940 It doesn't include what they call management, consultant, engineering, or temporary help.

00:03:38.160 Well, and it's interesting that you say that because on the top list, governments increasingly rely on outside firms for, when I did my research, IT, digital transformation, procurement, HR, cybersecurity, data analysis.

00:03:53.240 All of this is outside of that budget, you're saying?

00:03:56.680 Yes.

00:03:56.960 That's another $12-ish billion on top of the $23 billion.

00:04:01.320 and then you add a couple more billion for consulting you know we all know the the liberal

00:04:08.300 famous consulting contracts that went out which became justin trudeau's probably then one of the

00:04:14.200 key factors to his demise was you know going through that and then um you know the temporary

00:04:20.740 outsourcing just for jobs i think a lot okay so now you take a look at this and the critics will

00:04:26.700 say, okay, this kind of consulting creates a dependency ongoing. And I think that's obviously

00:04:33.280 illustrated. I can tell you that the names of the top six consulting firms, and we all know the

00:04:41.140 names. It's the KPMGs of the world, IBMs, Pricewaterhouse, Coopers, all of these big name

00:04:47.000 companies and consulting firms, of course, are big ticket winners of these contracts.

00:04:54.040 It reduces in-house expertise to some degree, the critics will say.

00:04:59.320 The critics will say it weakens accountability because there's no, you know, it's tough.

00:05:04.140 And we've seen this time and time again that when they try to, the government tried to remove $500 million from the budget, as I recall, on consulting fees.

00:05:12.500 But the problem was they didn't have the accounting backup to actually find where they could save that money.

00:05:18.160 So I do remember that.

00:05:19.420 And then the other thing that creates a problem, the critics will say, is it's a revolving door influence.

00:05:26.940 In other words, whatever consulting firms in there at the day will have an influence based on their other client base and so on and so forth.

00:05:34.060 I think those are all fair.

00:05:36.260 And I think that we've seen this illustrated.

00:05:38.720 But may I offer a counterpoint to this, to the critics?

00:05:42.840 Yeah.

00:05:43.240 Okay. 0.79

00:05:43.860 Shoot.

00:05:44.140 I can name seven or eight members of parliament that have ministerial positions in our cabinet 0.89

00:05:51.180 that have no idea what they're doing.

00:05:53.860 I mean, I could start to point fingers at our safety and immigration and resources.

00:05:59.480 These are individuals that really have no expertise.

00:06:02.420 And so I say to you, no, I don't want to reduce consultancy.

00:06:06.880 I want to increase it.

00:06:08.840 Okay. I would like to see it be the majority of the expertise that runs our government because I

00:06:15.540 don't want non-experts that come in and MPs will say this, Paul, I've said it to you. They feel

00:06:21.480 like they're drinking from a fire hose for the first six months that they're there. They finally

00:06:25.820 settle in, you know, coming around in a year and what happens to them? They get moved to another

00:06:30.900 post or they get demoted and they end up a backbencher. What good is that to anybody? What

00:06:36.260 I think is, and I don't know that it's been done, but if there's a rupture in the system

00:06:42.280 of accountability, let's handle that. Okay. First and foremost, let's create a system

00:06:47.040 that is so ironclad that as a consultant, almost to the point of a citizen looking it up,

00:06:54.140 we can see what you're getting paid for. And then let's run our government on the basis of

00:07:00.200 what the politicians say they'll do with the consultants. Lay out your consultant plan for

00:07:06.080 me if we're spending okay if we're spending north of 200 billion dollars on consultants while you're

00:07:12.080 in office show me your consultant firms show me what they're doing show me the experts that are

00:07:16.840 on the on the payroll there and and and look i'll take your newsletter every six months with what

00:07:22.840 the experts are reporting back but let's put experts in and not politicians all right so you

00:07:29.600 i get where you're going you're you're saying to solve the challenge is to actually start to vote

00:07:34.800 not only for the politician but his list of consultants yeah so you're you're basically

00:07:39.200 saying what they'll do with them not even just a list but this can we're going to bring consultants

00:07:42.940 in from this firm that do this at this price right wow okay well that's interesting so a

00:07:48.880 couple things i just want to back up because i think um this has been a major problem going on

00:07:53.720 for decades right i think we both agree this has been something that we've seen the increase in

00:07:58.760 consulting costs i even was one of them quite frankly we used to sit around i i remember sitting

00:08:04.020 around the table at one of the big consulting companies and we used to say, okay, what projects

00:08:08.580 are we going to put together? And we used to come up with these crazy buzzwords for projects that

00:08:12.920 we could actually sell to the government, sell to the private sector. We would go out with a

00:08:17.040 marketing firm, we would package them, we'd go to them and we, you know, whether it be a Y2K or

00:08:23.340 whatever, and we would actually create whole programs that we could outsource and sell

00:08:28.200 to government agencies. I can see these meetings now. Guys, I've got this idea. Now it's a crazy

00:08:32.720 acronym is called EBITDA oh yeah no no but we would do pitches yeah so then we they would they

00:08:38.560 would take us and they would uh we would get trained to pitch and they'd be pitch teams they

00:08:44.320 would go in and they'd pitch projects to the government and to private sector based on where

00:08:48.480 we were going and and you know interesting idea um and it was because in those days government was so

00:08:55.200 poorly paid so ministers were so poorly paid so one of the things that we kind of filled in the

00:09:01.600 the gap when this really took off and this was uh crepes i'm aging myself but this was in maybe the

00:09:07.400 late 80s early 90s this really kind of became the craze because governments were finding there was

00:09:12.620 a brain drain there wasn't enough people that they could pull into government that had the

00:09:17.380 the wherewithal to run these crazy projects that we were pitching and they were crazy projects and

00:09:23.520 there were some smart guys like i'm not saying the guys around me were brilliant some of them

00:09:27.420 on the consulting side and they really did have skill sets the government couldn't replace right

00:09:32.440 but now over the last you know few decades every year we see politicians coming in and they say

00:09:39.800 okay let's give ourselves a 10 raise let's give ourselves a 20 raise so now we did a show recently

00:09:45.980 i was shocked how much at the municipal provincial and federal level that a politician makes oh it's

00:09:53.920 a good paycheck oh yeah so now you know it's interesting i'm just gonna uh i did a an article

00:09:59.980 in a newspaper in mississauga recently and i did uh on what they make uh mayor makes 300 plus

00:10:07.260 thousand uh the counselors if they're you know on the peel board and also on the board the mayor

00:10:13.240 makes 300 000 plus dollars per year yes just wanted to unders underscore that it's you know

00:10:20.440 how many people run for mayor it's not a huge group the voting base is not huge and we hand

00:10:25.240 over three hundred thousand dollars and often the mayor mayor scar pity for example i mean he's built

00:10:30.180 an empire by the sounds of the highest paid mayor in canada i think at this point we're well above

00:10:35.000 the 300 and and then you have uh counselors making 200 plus so say 230 so now you know you're getting

00:10:43.140 into the point where everyone's so now so the consultants and the politicians are in the same

00:10:48.700 snack bracket uh they are now i'll be totally transparent if you're a highly performing

00:10:55.900 consultant like that and you're at the senior management senior management level or partner

00:11:01.420 level you're making double or more than that you're doing really well so if you catch a like

00:11:06.700 in in my career um i was on the first bond offering for the greater toronto airports authority

00:11:12.940 i was the acting cfo of the gtaa at that time it was very interesting gig i did very well by it

00:11:20.220 quite frankly it was a you know it was a good gig quite frankly we got the project going

00:11:26.860 you know it was a whole political shuffle and then one day we were just given the airport

00:11:32.220 and then we had to restart rebuilding it with new terminals and everything so

00:11:35.660 if you're if you're a good performing and you're a lucky consultant and you get on the right

00:11:40.380 projects, you can bonus really well. So, so the consulting teams do really well. The political

00:11:47.160 teams are starting, you know, they're getting up there. They were really lowly paid. Like I said,

00:11:52.560 now they're getting up into the decent zone. So now we should start to put the onus on not only

00:11:59.360 the voters, but the politicians to be up to speed on a file. So, you know, like a consultant. So if

00:12:06.020 you've, you know, I give you more money. I say, here's more money. You need to be there.

00:12:10.720 You need to be there now. So I guess the, the old, you know, you mentioned, I've heard it a

00:12:16.680 million times. I'm drinking out of a fire hose. Yeah. No, no, I'm paying you to drink from the

00:12:21.980 fire hose. Drink, drink, drink, drink quickly. Yeah. Right. Cause that's why you're starting

00:12:25.520 to get paid so much. So, you know, that's a, I just wanted to go back and know, but I,

00:12:29.380 and I agree with that point entirely. Yeah. Uh, I do, I do see consultancy firms as fat cats to

00:12:35.620 some degree oh yeah but you know we rely on them I guess for for the expertise that's not there

00:12:41.340 what I think is concerning to me is the lack of transparency that comes with consulting so I would

00:12:46.700 almost rather and I of course I've had a wackadoodle idea here potentially but the the mission

00:12:53.540 behind it and the sentiment behind it is probably consistent with many Canadians which is okay if

00:12:59.260 you're going to do something at least let us see behind the curtain what you're doing right because

00:13:04.760 it would be better for all of us you would probably get better support from people we would

00:13:10.900 see that you're employing people yeah you know what i mean i i really think that the other thing

00:13:16.200 is if i was a politician i would want this i would want this because i would constantly be

00:13:20.980 able to blame the consultants well you know the consultants yeah sure you know it gives you a

00:13:27.300 safety net. Yeah. But you're being, I guess, in the, you know, our government is voted in not for

00:13:35.820 safety nets. It's voted in to make decisions. So the more consultants we hire, the less we're,

00:13:41.700 you know, they can go back and say that we were advised to do this. Well, we have, and I just

00:13:47.120 checked before I came into the show, we have 448,000 approximate public service members.

00:13:52.960 Okay. So, you know, half a million people in public service. We had a lot of smart people

00:13:58.000 in public service. Right. And again, that tug and pull is supposed to be between government

00:14:02.320 and bureaucracy. That's, that's what keeps us on a straight and narrow path in the parliamentary

00:14:07.400 political system that we're in today. We have to have that tug and pull now. And as you point out,

00:14:12.660 government jobs are paying better at the consultancy and executive level. Sure. Now,

00:14:16.960 Now, you know, if you look at and I've done this and math before I've done the calculation, if you look at like and when I was a consultant, great gig, I paid into a benefit plan that was set up and there was a match to the benefit plan and everything else.

00:14:33.920 If you look at a government pension plan, your argument that you're not making as much money as the consulting team is a misnomer, to tell you the truth.

00:14:47.700 So if your average age is, say you live to 80, quite frankly, you retire at 60-something because you factored out.

00:14:55.380 Government workers traditionally factor out at three times the average of three times their last salary, times a factor.

00:15:02.380 I've watched it in my own family.

00:15:03.920 So if you, you basically get a factor 80, so you get, uh, you know, 80% of your last average three

00:15:10.280 years. If you go out at 200,000, you're making 160,000 in your retirement plus a full benefit

00:15:16.180 package. Your total package lifetime is, is pretty damn good and pretty close to probably

00:15:22.980 what that consultant who's making more money at the beginning. So the argument now that

00:15:27.320 we don't have enough skilled, I think all those arguments back in the nineties and late eighties

00:15:32.420 were good arguments i think we passed those and i know we passed them because when you do the

00:15:37.460 calculation of what everyone makes now i don't think you can actually have those discussions

00:15:42.020 anymore politicians make too much it has to be commensurate right to some degree you get nobody

00:15:47.240 or you get the worst right right the brain drain draws everybody away yeah yeah well what's uh

00:15:54.580 sevens higher fives right yeah so even what you do is you start to get a bunch of people inside

00:15:59.980 government to hire people less talented than themselves. Sevens hire fives is the name of

00:16:03.860 this episode, Brady. Let's write that down. I like that. So, so now, okay, let's walk through

00:16:09.140 your scenario. So you go out and it's election time. Yeah. You come to the table and you, you

00:16:15.240 know, my name's Bill, I'm running for ward, whatever seat. Um, you know, I'm going to run

00:16:21.460 with uh abc efg company because i want to be the minister of housing and they have the most skill

00:16:31.220 sets okay you okay at the basic level yeah but i would hope that they would be like yeah here's

00:16:38.160 the projects that i want to address right and here are the consultants associated and here's

00:16:42.700 what they're already giving me estimates right okay okay that does sound a little crazy now that

00:16:48.960 i've said it out loud i understand but that that is my but it isn't very interesting because if

00:16:53.200 you're if you are using consultants to this extent to run your government you are really voting for

00:17:02.100 that group like i understand where you're going i do i it does so it's so funny but yes that's

00:17:09.180 what i would prefer yeah i don't know why i've given up on the i'm so sorry i guess what i'm

00:17:14.940 saying is i've given up on that political front right but okay so then um a little bit of a

00:17:24.200 challenge and i think you you hit on it at the beginning of this show the memory of your

00:17:29.700 government erodes yeah the you know the basically that tug and pull i talked about the why things

00:17:38.260 were done the direction of the government the the the history will start to erode because now

00:17:44.560 you're actually replacing it with a third party a third party which quite frankly might have you

00:17:51.220 know we did for example the consulting firm I worked for we did projects across the world so

00:17:57.720 we had like team members in Africa Egypt you know part of how I ended up getting into the you know

00:18:06.300 the business I did when I was a young man was I went on a consulting gig in the U.S. and I ended

00:18:13.880 up falling in love with an industry and that's how i started but you know the problem was those

00:18:20.000 companies are far and wide and they have a lot of objectives they look at a global scenario so when

00:18:26.100 we used to go to our annual meetings we didn't look at canada we didn't look at the u.s we didn't

00:18:30.580 look we looked at the globe it was really and for a young man it was really interesting because we

00:18:34.580 used to have our annual conference when they became a senior manager and they used to fly us

00:18:39.380 to all these crazy over to europe and we go to england we you know go to paris and maybe all

00:18:45.300 different for the for the annual conferences and they would they would have um business leaders

00:18:50.500 from the organization across the world wow and they would talk about how they globally saw the

00:18:55.460 world these consulting firms they didn't talk about specifically and then we'd have we'd have

00:19:00.740 a canadian arm and off we go so you have to remember is the world is being controlled they're

00:19:07.140 They're a big part of the strategy for the world for different governments.

00:19:12.520 And I think sometimes we don't think about that, right?

00:19:14.900 That is true.

00:19:15.800 Yeah.

00:19:16.400 Now, is that a benefit or is it a real problem maybe?

00:19:20.740 Oh, it's a definite problem.

00:19:22.120 I saw it as a kid.

00:19:23.820 I'd be like, okay, the direction I'm getting to do a project here,

00:19:27.940 is it based on a global strategy of this company

00:19:30.860 or is it based on a Canadian strategy?

00:19:34.360 And that's where you have to be careful

00:19:35.760 Because once you start to, you know, once you start to outsource the government, you're outsourcing it to companies that have then, you know, created their own globals.

00:19:45.660 They want, you know, if you're an IT company, now, and especially in this day and age with like AI, Quafer, think about it.

00:19:52.280 I'm an AI company.

00:19:54.180 I have global services.

00:19:56.000 You know, I was listening to Elon Musk yesterday.

00:19:59.080 His vision of the world is wild.

00:20:01.600 It is pretty different.

00:20:02.760 different yeah he's talking about ai data centers and uh being built on like on the moon now like

00:20:09.380 it's crazy this conversation yesterday i was watching and i'm thinking to myself wow this

00:20:13.600 is a little scary you know he's going to build it all up there and i'm and i'm thinking to myself

00:20:17.680 what is his vision of the globe so now he's the guy who's going to come in and give you consulting

00:20:23.160 services on starlink or something else like these are all interesting ideas no you raise a good

00:20:27.800 point the perspective coming from another if i was in dubai creating a project my perspective would

00:20:34.780 be from dubai right and with influence on wherever i'm doing business or you know diplomacy yeah

00:20:44.940 yeah you raise a good point i get it so essentially look we can be we can be directing

00:20:50.400 global efforts that don't really benefit us at home through these consultant firms

00:20:55.760 I can see that.

00:20:57.000 Well, they're coming to the table. 0.66

00:20:57.880 I mean, the last thing you want is to bring a finance and banking consultant from another country in to run your country.

00:21:03.600 Yeah.

00:21:04.120 Do you?

00:21:07.060 I'm not going.

00:21:07.940 That was just for fun.

00:21:09.140 That was just for fun.

00:21:10.120 No, no, but it is a very interesting scenario that we have to watch out for.

00:21:13.620 So then, you know, so this is the interesting part, and I'm going to go off on it for a minute.

00:21:19.020 We've not done, we've not looked at it that way, which I find totally bizarre at this point.

00:21:24.900 So we've kind of said, okay, we're going to allow third parties to come in, provide us advice.

00:21:29.820 We're going to take advice from them.

00:21:31.160 We're going to go in a direction.

00:21:32.680 And I think part of that is kind of why we get some of our wacky decisions. 0.76

00:21:37.060 And wacky to the point where we'll go over, we'll come up with an immigration policy that actually started in France somewhere, lasted 30 days, was a total bomb. 0.58

00:21:49.160 And we take it, we put it into Canada, and we leave it.

00:21:52.800 and we don't touch it again because some consulting firm put their name on it and we're like oh that's

00:21:57.380 okay they put their name on it like so i think the two things nobody wants to admit failure and

00:22:01.940 secondly well that's the policy we chose it did not work over there it didn't and a lot of times

00:22:07.480 we find in canada right now is these policies that we got from these consulting firms that

00:22:12.100 we transferred over to our own country they've already stale dated in the other country they

00:22:16.660 bombed and we let them go and we serve it and we let them go because we actually got comfortable

00:22:22.880 that someone else's name was on that so we'd like yeah my name's not on let it run right i'm still

00:22:28.040 getting my six weeks vacation i'm still getting my pension i'm still getting there so i don't have

00:22:32.480 to worry about it and we've done a lot of that in the last 10 years right it's been that is true

00:22:36.660 it's been a it's been a real travesty on how we've done it once again kind of behind the curtain

00:22:41.160 yeah yeah we've done about it but but you know mike before the show i went in and i started

00:22:46.400 looking around i said who has managed this really well so and and what i mean manage this so i'm

00:22:52.820 gonna uh but who is actually took a look at their uh contracts and their outsourcing of projects

00:23:00.080 really well and of course a country that we talk about quite a bit uh on the energy front which is

00:23:06.960 Norway um has done it exceptional so I want to talk to you I feel badly that the more we talk 0.55

00:23:12.660 about uh this country the more I feel like we're jinxing them everybody stay away from Norway okay

00:23:17.140 they've got it they've got it right many well I know my next trip I mentioned before the show I

00:23:21.140 am going there I think it's fascinating an amazing country actually it is well you well you know as

00:23:26.700 you look at this oil crisis and we go through it in everywhere around the world now it's impacting

00:23:31.360 you see this country which is not a huge country population wise you know it's about a quarter our

00:23:36.620 size um they just took a direction when uh the rest of the world didn't you know back in the 80s

00:23:43.380 in the late early 80s and they started to strategize on an eight-year cycle so they didn't

00:23:50.580 they didn't stick to the four-year election cycle right they started to create plans that were eight

00:23:55.560 you know eight years long now we you know uh u.s president was just in china and there was a lot

00:24:04.180 discussion on the airwaves about the difference between a communist and a you know a democratic

00:24:09.780 and free capitalist society um and one of the discussions that you heard a lot about is how

00:24:15.140 the long-term vision for china is the goal no matter who the leader is right norway have this

00:24:21.060 long 100 year plan 100 year plan and they work at it and they're not in a hurry they don't have to

00:24:26.580 you know you hear all these things norway is not the same it's a democratic society but but quite

00:24:32.660 frankly, they take a longer approach and they do that through the way they've structured their

00:24:38.420 government, which is interesting. So, and I took a look at a couple of things. So IT projects.

00:24:44.020 So their IT projects are only outsourced to companies to add on to their centralized backbone.

00:24:52.580 Okay. So what does that mean? That they already have created their own policy, procedures,

00:24:57.560 uh process yes well and they they basically have so the government is there's one department that

00:25:05.480 handles all the system systems for every ministry of government okay so and then the add-ons are

00:25:11.860 projects the plugins are into that system so consultants are hired but they're hired like

00:25:18.480 for example if we have the ministry of transportation and they're it actually reports

00:25:25.140 all into the central hub which is the backbone system of the government and there's an uh there's

00:25:31.560 an app or an addition or an extension of that system to take care of air traffic control to

00:25:37.200 take care of highway planning to take care of all those things that system works within the same

00:25:42.220 backbone and is secured the same by the bureaucracy of the country it's not outsource i understand so

00:25:49.840 the systematic outsourcing is transparent to that system. Yes. And likely only hired on once the

00:25:58.960 government has begun a project or has budgeted for this one specific part. They're not blanket

00:26:05.460 handing off ministries by and large to consultants. Right. You know, we talked about the 448,000

00:26:12.700 civil servants that we have on the federal level in Canada right now. I don't know. It's we did a

00:26:19.380 thing on the show and i'm probably going to get the number wrong so forgive me but the project

00:26:24.300 for payroll a new payroll system has gone on for a decade it's it's incredible tens of millions

00:26:30.720 over budget and it has no apparent end again outsourced quite frankly has been a runaway

00:26:39.420 program not getting to the end these are these are why our projects go the norwegians have taken

00:26:46.200 another approach they have a longer term planning cycle for all their programs like i said the eight

00:26:51.160 years they centralize their key technology and and it works for them the other thing they do that i

00:26:57.720 thought was really interesting they have labor laws that only allow let's call it a one-for-one

00:27:05.400 replacement of government workers so you can only replace one government worker with one consultant

00:27:11.400 or international yes and so if you have a if you have a key uh government worker go off leave

00:27:17.160 pregnancy whatever quite frankly you can bring in a consultant um i did that role i actually uh with

00:27:23.080 the one company i was with uh which was it was for bad accountants who were outsourced to become

00:27:28.520 cfos of companies who had lost their cfo okay so you can get a new cfo but you get one

00:27:34.520 until that other new cfo gets located rehired or comes back so they have very strict laws

00:27:41.320 uh the norwegians about how they don't get a team yes you get a person they're protecting

00:27:48.140 the institutional memory of the state i love that line that's a great line it is a great line and

00:27:53.420 very important to your uh because again the goals of your state won't necessarily align with the

00:28:00.420 goals of the outsourced consulting companies. In other words, what's good for Norway stays

00:28:07.000 what's good for Norway and doesn't necessarily have to plug into where consultants are in other

00:28:11.940 parts of the world trying to handle scenarios for those countries. Exactly. State authored

00:28:18.220 contracts. This is a really interesting approach. So we have the same thing. We don't use it. I

00:28:23.960 don't know why we don't use it. Sorry, we don't do this? No, no. So for some reason, again,

00:28:28.500 And I'm going to go off on a tangent for a minute, but a little bit of the outsourcing government.

00:28:33.120 You have to ask yourself, and when I'm reading through this, I'm thinking, okay, our governments go on a large number of trips, so abroad and conferences to learn about other governments.

00:28:50.060 so you think at some point in our history in our canadian history we would have figured out quite

00:28:55.560 frankly that we need to approach this a little differently but we obviously decided not to do it

00:29:01.940 and you got to ask yourself why do we like it the way it is because we know the way it is doesn't

00:29:07.740 work very efficiently like we're not uh our productivity in canada isn't like raging we're

00:29:13.720 We're not doing anything on a world record, world-breaking scale when it comes to manufacturing or mining or housing or anything else.

00:29:23.700 So we've got to ask ourselves, is it the system of choice by the governments over the last 50, 100 years?

00:29:34.340 Has it basically been something we've liked because it gives us more power on the political side?

00:29:43.720 There has to be a rationale for it because no rational mind would think that the way

00:29:47.840 we run this is the right state.

00:29:51.380 When we threw this show idea, my initial reaction was to hate the consulting thing

00:29:56.180 overall because of the transparency factor.

00:30:00.060 Right.

00:30:01.360 Then I started to think about the politicians that I've met over the years, and I thought,

00:30:05.040 oh boy, we really do need some experts.

00:30:07.760 Yeah.

00:30:07.860 As you and I talked, the one, I mean, I did point out that it was a bit of a whack-a-doodle idea that I had to illustrate a point.

00:30:15.760 It's a solution.

00:30:16.800 It's not the whole solution.

00:30:18.200 I think the solution that I hear in all of this, Paul, is that eight-year institutional memory.

00:30:26.860 that the institution of the government

00:30:31.540 remains beholden to this system

00:30:34.640 and we stick to it.

00:30:38.460 I think what happens in Canada

00:30:40.260 is we could have the same glory.

00:30:42.580 We could be having the same story right now.

00:30:44.540 Paul, like, okay, we, you know, one for one,

00:30:47.380 you know, we have a system by which

00:30:50.060 we only bring consultants in at this point.

00:30:51.760 We know exactly what they're doing.

00:30:53.900 We've made sure that there's nobody

00:30:55.280 that we could hire on full-time to do this in the government but we've lost control of that with

00:30:59.720 only two times more of the population so i think there is where the problem stems now how do you

00:31:09.960 unring the consulting bell how do you unring it well i guess you have to get people to commit to

00:31:16.100 it you know and that's if the intention is i guess you know and i think as canadians as we

00:31:20.960 get into the next phase of of what's going to happen in the country i think we have to ask

00:31:25.840 ourself do we need to do that now like i think that's the question we have to ask of our

00:31:31.040 governments do we need to stop this and do we need to internalize the talent and basically

00:31:36.840 create the institutional state uh memory um here at home um you know still using consulting firms

00:31:46.440 I'm not saying they're not, I was, I did it, I understand it, I think it does have value in places, but quite frankly, we can't dumb down our bureaucracy to the point where it doesn't have any powers or rights or, quite frankly, ability to alter change, figure out a long-term strategy for the country and enact it when we have a four-year voting cycle and we have consultants changing to and fro.

00:32:14.680 otherwise what we're doing is we're just creating a we're creating a sub industry of government

00:32:19.460 what we're doing is we're creating two two government industries one is an outsourced

00:32:24.380 which is almost as big as the insourced and therefore the two are battling constantly

00:32:30.020 the institutional memory is lost quite frankly because you got to think about it like i've

00:32:35.540 talked about my story i left the i left the country it's right i picked up and decided okay

00:32:40.780 i've seen that now i've globally understood what's going on i've decided to move off and

00:32:45.420 do other things you know before i came back and so you know as a young man it only made sense to

00:32:50.620 me that i had to learn more about the world so are these people that we're actually bringing in

00:32:55.340 to actually outsource to and they're creating these reports and projects and make things go

00:33:00.060 forward are they going to leave and and that's not good for canada that's the brain drain that

00:33:04.300 that we're trying to avoid. And that's really, we have no view on that. We have no eyeballs on

00:33:11.820 who comes and goes from a consulting firm because it is private. I think maybe somewhere in the

00:33:17.520 middle here, Paul, between my wackadoodle idea and how nicely it's been executed in Norway,

00:33:24.660 we have to find our way back to that center where we are. There is more transparency. We have

00:33:31.280 a longer institutional memory that would be a great thing for the next government to bring in

00:33:37.080 instead of telling us that you want more privacy for the conversations between government officials

00:33:42.180 and less privacy for Canadians why don't we focus on we're going to create something that gives us

00:33:48.540 longevity like Norway not something that's a flash in the pan idea that we're taking from

00:33:53.920 some country that helps us maintain a better UV rating I don't know yeah why don't we take

00:34:00.380 and reset this a little bit right in front of the eyes of Canadians saying here's where we've been

00:34:07.560 here's what we need to do to create it here's where it's working and here here are the pain

00:34:12.080 points to get us there but we're going to do it over eight years and we're going to pass it into

00:34:17.140 law so that no matter who comes in after us they're going to continue that strategy right well 0.67

00:34:22.720 it's interesting and also your contracting scenario so this is something the Norwegians

00:34:28.440 do really well they have a public and financial management board that forces vendors to standardize

00:34:37.800 risk shifting contracts so what they do it's a little different than we do so you sign a contract

00:34:42.840 with the government and for example arrive can that's one you sign a government that goes to a

00:34:49.560 centralized now we did have you know we do have this we don't do it very well and it's probably

00:34:54.440 because of discipline versus structure, but we don't do it very well. They do it very well. So

00:34:59.740 they centralize their contracts. They offload the risk. So as a consultant, you can get paid very

00:35:05.360 well, but you have to perform very well. So you couldn't have this payroll scenario where the

00:35:10.660 payroll system never gets built. You can't have this arrive can scenario where it starts at 64,000

00:35:16.260 or hands at a hundred million dollars, right? None of these can happen because you would not get

00:35:21.200 paid right these contracts are these contracts are very well written very preferred they're

00:35:26.820 centralized right so they come out of a centralized source um and they go forward so you know this has

00:35:32.840 been traditionally what they've done that's interesting because you know why paul if a

00:35:36.580 contract goes bad the same division of the government's going to handle it in court they're

00:35:42.080 going to have experts that know how to handle that on behalf of the government yes it becomes a very

00:35:47.140 tidy fairly transparent process for outsourcing yeah that's a really clever idea yeah no and but

00:35:57.560 but again these are around right and each of these now the interesting part is is it's is

00:36:02.920 it's assigned to a outsourced group and the norwegians actually assign a project manager to

00:36:09.860 it from the central source so not only does the the ministry that's working with the consulting

00:36:16.920 team but there's someone who comes in this i've seen this on the premier level a few times in

00:36:22.400 canada and i've seen premiers do this effectively where they create like these a team of people

00:36:27.320 yes and they assign them to major projects as they assign them to their ministries i think this

00:36:33.000 is an excellent idea it's an excellent idea when you want to get stuff done on a on a fast-paced

00:36:39.100 basis and and not in a crazy over budget you know bad timeline where do these people come from

00:36:45.980 They usually come from consulting firms, so they usually are older gentlemen and ladies that actually have retired or are retiring, have moved on and are finishing their career, and they come to work inside governments.

00:37:01.640 They can be lawyers, accountants, doctors, people kind of at the end of their career.

00:37:06.920 They have no axe to grind.

00:37:08.480 They've made their money.

00:37:09.140 I was going to say.

00:37:09.960 They're doing it for the public good before they retire, and they get a good salary.

00:37:13.580 I'm not saying they do it for free.

00:37:15.080 They get well paid, but they also manage projects to their retirement and then they go off.

00:37:20.340 And I think that that's done really well in other countries.

00:37:23.940 The Norwegians just do an excellent job.

00:37:26.460 The other thing Norwegians actually do really well that we need to take a lesson from,

00:37:31.760 their technology and monitoring and compliance as each of these projects are rolling out for their software in each of these projects

00:37:39.860 have really intense security systems that they can monitor.

00:37:43.980 So these aren't just projects they cast out into the world and let run out.

00:37:47.880 You know, they surveil them.

00:37:49.280 They track them.

00:37:50.580 They CRM them.

00:37:52.200 They do us.

00:37:52.720 So there's a whole system.

00:37:54.500 Like, by having central surveillance on the projects, they actually run the projects in an organized way like you would in a business, which, you know, our prime minister.

00:38:02.380 Sort of at 30,000 feet, but with a full view.

00:38:04.600 Yeah.

00:38:05.060 Now, our prime minister knows this.

00:38:07.140 Like, quite frankly, he's, you know, he has been a business person.

00:38:09.940 You could make the argument previously that some of our prime ministers probably didn't have the skill sets, right?

00:38:15.560 No, but the acumen of this guy is...

00:38:17.400 He would know this, right?

00:38:18.460 Corporate structure and organization.

00:38:20.320 He would know centralized systems.

00:38:22.040 He would know contracting.

00:38:23.300 He would know security.

00:38:24.320 He had been around major security firms that would have overseen projects on a national and on a provincial level.

00:38:31.380 So we know this as Canadians, but we decide not to do it.

00:38:36.080 And that's the crazy part of what's going on in the country right now.

00:38:39.260 now the worry i have this you know so because this can go on listen you know this debacle can

00:38:45.900 go on for as long as we want to go to go on as canadians the world's changing so i think what

00:38:51.740 all these people need to ask is the world change is this system sustainable like can you run a

00:38:59.440 decentralized system by ministry have them go just you know we've we've become um uh desensitized

00:39:08.740 we have to these to these messes that constantly we hear about so on a weekly monthly basis we

00:39:15.720 hear okay here's another runaway train this project took off never completed this another

00:39:20.280 so we got desensitized to these projects and to these things going on as they were outsourced and

00:39:27.020 they were put in the hands and reported on and you know money was put towards the budgets and

00:39:31.980 we started building them and constructing them we got desensitized but now it's eroded our

00:39:38.200 efficiency in our production in the country in a time that we have to pick back up again so now we

00:39:43.620 have to pick back up and and start to get people employed producing things and making things again

00:39:48.160 can we afford to keep doing this and that's my i guess i come back to that not a lot of shows mike

00:39:53.780 but my worry about the way we're doing this is is it sustainable well i mean we'll take a look at

00:40:00.900 the you know over the course of carney's uh four years uh you know let's assume that he he does a

00:40:07.060 four-year run as prime minister, this is hundreds of billions of dollars in consulting, both

00:40:14.520 internally, externally, on the main line and below the line, probably much, much more. So yeah,

00:40:21.040 I do agree that we need to do something about how we handle consulting. I guess what I'm worried

00:40:27.580 about, and I would put out there, Paul, this is conjecture, but I would put out there that if I

00:40:32.460 was voting in Norway, I would be voting for somebody with a lot more scrutiny in my heart

00:40:37.440 than I've probably done as a, somebody here in Ontario, because I'm desensitized because I see

00:40:43.960 the system is broken often. Right. But if you are in Norway and you saw this institutional memory,

00:40:50.120 well, you know, look at it's yours to protect and who you elect is who will protect. That's

00:40:57.920 a little rhyme I came up with for Norway. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I get you. You know,

00:41:01.400 And when we go to the happiness shows, it always pops up of one of the happiest countries in the world.

00:41:06.860 It does, yeah.

00:41:07.820 Because housing, security, you know, the oil and gas scenario has created a wealth fund that has made them secure.

00:41:16.500 Their political system does seem well thought out and quite structured and planned.

00:41:22.500 So all these things, the comfort that you give to your country based on the things you're doing makes for happiness, right?

00:41:29.300 So the country is a happy country because, quite frankly, they're doing all these things to structure their government.

00:41:36.140 And I'm not saying get rid of consultants.

00:41:38.680 Just so we're on the same page.

00:41:40.140 I'm not saying get rid of consulting contracts.

00:41:44.900 I'm saying adopt some of these things.

00:41:47.520 Make the consulting contracts risk-based.

00:41:50.560 Have them absorb some of the risk.

00:41:52.700 Let's create a long-term strategy as well.

00:41:55.880 Centralize the contracts.

00:41:57.760 like we we should have been doing from day one quite frankly make them more driven to the

00:42:03.020 performance of the major projects that we're doing so listen if a bunch of smart people uh in uh

00:42:10.180 engineering firms go out and figure out amazing ways to mine things that makes us uh the world

00:42:15.800 leader yeah they should be compensated i would agree the wazoo yeah right but that's in the field

00:42:21.440 that's not doing a report to government that's actually executing a project the major project

00:42:27.680 It's a project. You're the third arm on that project that's going to go make sure that project

00:42:32.540 gets done on a timely basis. And that's where our money should be reallocated now. Our money

00:42:37.180 should be reallocated into infield performance for these companies. I feel like I got schooled,

00:42:43.040 Paul. No, you didn't. No, no, I really do. Because I think that you're right. I think that

00:42:47.580 many of the things that we could do, we just haven't done. And these were good suggestions.

00:42:53.860 And so poor Norway, man, we, they really are the test case for us. 0.97

00:42:58.040 Aren't they? They are. Uh, I hope you enjoy your vacation. Uh,

00:43:00.980 you won't need sunscreen. Thanks for joining us. Uh,

00:43:04.020 we'll catch you next time right here. Don't forget. You can subscribe,

00:43:07.220 tell your friends to do so you're supporting the network when you do that.

00:43:10.360 And you also get the full program, Paul. Thanks. I appreciate that.

00:43:13.720 Thanks Mike.

True Patriot Love - May 23, 2026

Has Canada Outsourced Its Government to Consultants？

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