At some point over the past decade in Canada, McKinsey & Company became the North Star for how to fix things in Ottawa. The management consulting company has been called in to help digitize the Canadian navy, create a ten-year plan for a government-owned bank, modernize leadership at our border services agency, provide an international view on transforming our immigration department, and much more.
They weren’t the only major firm getting millions in these government contracts. Along with their rivals, McKinsey has formed a shadow public service—an army of analysts, many with degrees from impressive business schools, who promise to govern better than the bureaucrats.
Ottawa became increasingly reliant on McKinsey and the others, more than doubling its spending on management consultants over the Liberals’ time in office. Journalists then started asking questions about what, exactly, all this spending was getting us. Similar questions were raised across the industrialized world, where McKinsey and others have had a similar rise. Parliamentary hearings followed, interrogating the value for money of these lucrative gigs. Just as suddenly as he had ushered in this new consultocracy, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered it to end—vowing, when I spoke with him in an interview for The Walrus, to “crack down.”
I’m Indigenous in northern Ontario and whenever First Nation governments are accused of stuff like this, we are demonized as incapable corrupt governments that are in hands of private interests, wealthy individuals and generally wasting money for no value because we don’t know what we are doing.
When the federal government does this … the country gets to debate it as just another function of government.
Yeah, I’m familiar with some aspects of consulting, and consulting in government and some large organizations is kind of crazy. It’s really appealing that for a “competitive price” government workers can be even lazier than they would be doing the work themselves, because they leave the “thinking” part to consultants.
Problem is that competency has left the public service, because pay is more lucrative from these contracts, except for manager types. But it’s to such an extent that the government cannot make decisions that they are supposed to be making, and so the contractors really only can do stuff that seems pleasing to the contracting manager, so you end up with solutions like “digitize”, “make things go faster”, “AI”, which are dumb and obvious to knowledgeable people and journalists, but specific and proper solutions can’t be vetted at a technical level by the people in charge though they needed to be. Or the managers get caught up on useless parts of it and miss out on the better parts. Or they are so indecisive and influenced by one or more contractors, that ultimately, the laziest crowdpleaser solutions are adopted.
With consolidation of firms the problems are multifold. Look at what happened with MNP and the BC clean energy program: the same consulting firm can play all sides so they always come out on top, as the judge, jury, lawyers and executioner of a money-distributing process.
This problem is pervasive and not limited to governments/public services, though there are numerous instances. If you think Conservatives are going to fix this you are misguided, it will only funnel more money to contractors and the people of Canada get less for it.
Is this a good time to pipe up and say New Public Management was a bad idea?
Huh, sounds like the typical filling of pockets that politicians do with their friends.
I think this is more heinous actually. To be sure, the public loses and unfairness reigns when a government assigns a contract to complete a project to a company they’re associated with (e.g., owned by a friend of the political leader/minister) without a proper competition. But this - consultancy on major policy projects - undermines things to a much higher degree in my eyes. I think ‘democracy’ is on life support, and this is yet another example of it. Quality piece from the Walrus, except the line that suggesting that Trudeau’s “vowing” to end something unpopular after the public learns about it has any meaning whatsoever. I’ll believe it when I see it, because of course we still haven’t seen the proportional representation he promised.
Something that’s really alarming is that while public-facing politics has become far more about marketing than policy, this article shows that politics ‘happens’ without the public but with - or perhaps by - these unscrupulous corporate-minded consultancy firms.
Unless the LPC can show that they actually have working Canadians’ interests in minds - which this story and the idea of Mark Carney leading the party are very far removed from - they’re going to lose a LOT of seats to the Conservatives come next election. I don’t have many positive feelings about the Liberals because shit like this is so on-brand for them, but they sure are less destructive than the Conservatives. Here’s hoping the LPC gets their heads out of their asses some time soon
