Photo by: Austin Distel

Trudeau has outsourced $100 million of contracts to McKinsey & Company, proving yet again that the liberals have no problem deferring to a technocratic neoliberal view of governance. 

In ancient Greece, they coined the term pharmakon: something that acts as a remedy and a poison at the same time. Consultancy contracts are necessary, any functioning nation needs them. However, the outsourcing of contracts instead of pumping funds into grassroots organizations or trusting intra-government services is a pharmakon that the Liberal government of Canada relies too heavily on.

In 2015, the Liberals ran on cutting back on outsourced corporate consultancy and, in 2016 committed yet again to cutting bills on consultants. Since then, spending on outsourced consultants jumped by 74 per cent, from $8 billion in 2015 to $14 billion in 2021. 

The technocratic bend to the current liberal consensus is that experts should rule that they are experts in global profit-extraction. McKinsey & Company is a good example of a consultancy corporation that puts private interest before people, having lawsuits thrown their way over exacerbating the opioid crisis, meddling in the tobacco and fossil fuel industries, and finally helping lay the carpet down for some of the most authoritarian regimes in the world. 

It’s often hard to unearth the nefarious dealings of large consultancy and contractor agencies because they make their workers and clients sign non-disclosure agreements. This put former Indiana mayor, 2020 presidential candidate and former McKinsey & Company consultant Pete Buttigieg in hot water during his campaign trail. 

Furthermore, this is ultimately the public’s money going towards a specific elite class of people who have very specific and fixed views of how the world ought to operate, that is a neoliberal view. 

Canadians have to ask, with the current neoliberal paradigm bludgeoning workers in order to combat inflation in the vein of Thatcherite policies, should our money that shapes society go towards cryptic outsiders like McKinsey & Company? 

Canada needs funds to be diverted in house to be used by a government that is ostensibly beholden to the people.