At the end of that meeting, NDP MP Gord Johns (Courtenay-Alberni, B.C.) put forward a motion for the for the committee to expand the scope of its study beyond McKinsey and Company, to include an examination of government consulting contracts with Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Accenture, KPMG, and Ernst & Young.
"We need to get to the bottom of it, we have not gotten to the bottom. We just went after the minor player in the $100-million-plus procurement club," said Johns in an interview with The Hill Times.
During the first two committee meetings, Liberal MP Anthony Housefather (Mount Royal, Que.) repeatedly stressed that the committee had already been underway on a study of government outsourcing more generally, but that was now sidelined due to the McKinsey study. He questioned whether that study wouldn't have been more relevant to some of the testimony the committee was hearing for the McKinsey study.
Johns said his motion will open the topic back up to be a bigger discussion about government outsourcing, but that the committee will have more time to conduct this study (it has 11 meetings allotted for the current study on McKinsey, as opposed to the four it had allocated for its previous study).
"There's a lot of explaining to be done here. And I think we're just opening up the can of worms, just getting started. And when we have all six companies testify, then we'll have some pretty good recommendations back to government, how to put a stop to it," Johns said.