Poilievre calls for study of consulting company's earning spike under Liberal government

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is calling for a committee study of the government’s relationship with a consulting firm following reports it has been awarded 30 times more money in federal contracts under Justin Trudeau’s Liberals than Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.

As previously reported by Radio-Canada and The Globe and Mail, McKinsey and Company made $2.2 million from federal contracts over the nine years Harper’s Conservatives were in power, compared to $66 million in six years under the Trudeau Liberals.

Poilievre is calling for an inquiry by the parliamentary Standing Government Operations and Estimates Committee, which would seek all written records related to McKinsey, including emails and text messages. He said he does not feel a full-scale public inquiry is required at this point.

“People can’t even pay their bills, yet there are companies linked to the Trudeau Liberals being awarded large contracts worth tens of millions of dollars,” Poilievre said at a press conference Tuesday.

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Radio-Canada is also reporting the government department that has awarded the largest contracts to McKinsey is Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

Poilievre questioned the value of those contracts while there’s a backlog of about 1.2 million immigration applications, asking, “What did we get as Canadians? What are the results of this management company’s ingenious work?”

McKinsey said in a statement released Tuesday the company follows procurement laws and its work with the Canadian government is “entirely non-partisan in nature and focuses on core management topics, such as digitization and operations improvement.”

The statement adds: “Our firm does not make policy recommendations on immigration or any other topic,” and that the company is aware of calls for a parliamentary committee study into its work, an opportunity it welcomes.

Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-François Blanchet also held a press conference Tuesday to echo Poilievre’s calls for a committee study.

Blanchet said he’s particularly concerned about the lack of transparency in this case, and the risk of incurring added costs by hiring a private company to potentially do the work of the public service.

“The questions it raises for us are not around the international firm,” he said, “but rather, why did the Government of Canada hand over its priorities, through contracts, to a private foreign company?”

Poilievre also questioned former McKinsey global managing director Dominic Barton’s later appointment to Canadian ambassador to China, a position he left in 2021.

“It's time for Canadians to get answers,” Poilievre said. “We need to know what this money was for, what influence McKinsey has had in our government, and it is time for Canadian taxpayers to have answers to these questions.”

In a statement, NDP MP and ethics critic Matthew Green said the New Democrats are supportive of a committee study into McKinsey’s government contracts.

“Canada has a strong public service who can do this work at a fraction of the cost, so there’s no reason for Trudeau to choose to hand buckets of money to his billionaire CEO friends instead,” Green said. “Canadians have to be able to trust that their money is being spent to benefit real people.”

Public Services and Procurement Minister Helena Jaczek’s office wrote in a statement it maintains “the highest standards of openness, transparency, and fiscal responsibility.”

“We have not received a formal request from the government operations and estimates committee, but will work with the committee if a motion is adopted on the matter,” the statement also reads.

Michael Wernick — a former clerk of the Privy Council who now works as a consultant — said he can’t speak to the McKinsey case specifically because he is no longer in government, but that “all governments have contracted professional services going back as far as [he] can remember, for a variety of purposes.”

He added that sometimes the public service does not have the expertise in a certain area, citing the examples of cybersecurity and software development.

“It makes perfect sense to rent that expertise from outside from time to time,” he said.

With all opposition parties on the parliamentary committee in favour of launching a committee study, they’d have the votes required to begin such a study, next time they convene a meeting.

With files from CTV National News Ottawa bureau chief Joyce Napier and producer Ian Wood