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’m Indigenous in northern Ontario and whenever First Nation governments are accused of stuff like this, we are demonized as incapable corrupt governments that are in hands of private interests, wealthy individuals and generally wasting money for no value because we don’t know what we are doing.
When the federal government does this … the country gets to debate it as just another function of government.