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 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