Canadians deserve answers on Conservatives' and Liberals' long-standing partnership with expensive consulting firms. Along with my New Democrat colleagues I am calling to investigate firms that have been raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from the government. Canada spent $15 billion of public funds in 2022 alone on outsourcing. The Conservative and the Liberals prefer to give public money to their friends at consulting firms when Canada has one of the best public services in the world.
Gord Johns, an NDP MP on the operations committee who introduced the motion to expand the investigation to more consultancies, told the Globe it was alarming to hear about Accenture’s work on CEBA.
“We assumed it was running through the public service,” he said. “We didn’t know this until now.”
Johns – who noted the six companies in the probe have seen their government contracts balloon from $50 million a decade ago to $500 million today – said increased outsourcing leads to higher costs for taxpayers and diminishes the capacity of the public service, which leads to even more reliance on expensive consultants.
NDP MP Gord Johns tells Moore In The Morning how a parliamentary committee was handed heavily redacted documents from the government surrounding the ArriveCAN app.
NDP MP Gord Johns — who brought forward a motion to expand the scope of the study to include other consulting firms — suggested that large companies have an inside track on government contracts based on personal connections.
"What is McKinsey doing? Who does McKinsey know?" Johns asked, accusing both Liberal and Conservative governments of prioritizing the private sector over the public sector.
Johns said he wants the study to include other consultancies — such as Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Accenture, KPMG and Ernst & Young — to get a broader sense of public service outsourcing.
"We need to look at the whole scope of this thing and we need answers and we need all of these companies before this committee," Johns said. "They need to explain how they're getting these contracts."
New Democrats have been making the same argument, and they are hoping to see the committee expand its study to include other consulting firms that have received large contracts.
New Democrat MP Gord Johns aims to bring forward a motion at a committee hearing next Monday to expand the scope of the study to include other firms including Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Accenture, KPMG and Ernst & Young.
A researcher testifying before the committee earlier this week called the focus on McKinsey a distraction.
Amanda Clarke, an associate professor of public administration at Carleton University, said the study should focus on the public service's reliance on consulting firms overall.
"The focus on outsourcing and contracting in the federal government is the broad enough umbrella to get at these issues and any given firm," Clarke said Monday.
Ottawa- The NDP is calling on a House of Commons Committee to expand its study of federal contracts awarded to McKinsey & Company and include other consulting firms that have received large contracts.
"Canadians are really upset to see that the Liberal government has given hundreds of millions of dollars to a private company instead of letting Canada's public service do the jobs we hired them to do," Gord Johns said in a press release.
"We need to get to the bottom of how much money has been spent in contacting with private companies, outside of McKinsey, under both the Liberals and Conservatives"
The Globe has reported the company that received the lion’s share of the ArriveCAN project relies almost entirely on subcontractors. Neither the government nor the company will reveal the names of the subcontractors.
Bloc Quebecois MP Julie Vignola said the redactions mean taxpayers have no way of knowing who was paid what or what service they delivered.
“The goal is to ensure that taxpayers got their money’s worth and to suggest improvements if ever a similar situation were to arise again,” she said.
The NDP’s Gord Johns said the government is avoiding transparency.
At the end of the two-hour meeting with the federal departments and agencies connected to the app, the committee unanimously approved a motion from NDP MP Gord Johns asking the Office of the Procurement Ombudsman to review the government's contracting work related to the app.
Mr. Johns said the Ombudsman may be able to review the matter more quickly than the Auditor-General, who has also been asked to examine the issue via a House of Commons vote earlier this month.