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.”
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?