Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses.
To build on some of the comments of my colleague, Mrs. Kusie, my biggest concern is that we have this “McKinsey model” of inappropriate relationships between government and big business that is actually being deployed again with the appointment of Mark “carbon tax” Carney.
In general, I would say that a free market economy requires a sharp distinction between government and business, especially big business. Public entities have to be able to make neutral and fair decisions based on the common good and without personal favouritism. They respond to democratic deliberations about the common good. Private entities, on the other hand, are partial. They seek to advance their own interests. They are primarily responsible for advancing particular goods, as opposed to the common good, and play an important role in our economy as players on the field advancing their own particular interests.
One of the biggest problems we saw in politics over the last nine years was a blurring of these lines, with big government and big business getting together and, in particular, big business getting into government and seeking to shape outcomes to their advantage. The call for good people to engage in public service is used as an excuse for allowing some very elite personalities to keep a foot in both worlds. It's fine for someone to come from the business world into politics, provided that they're prepared to sever ties and not bridge these two worlds in a way that creates serious conflict of interest problems, yet we've seen this what I would call a McKinsey model.
Dominic Barton was chairing the finance minister's advisory council on economic growth. Andrew Pickersgill at McKinsey supported Dominic Barton's efforts by supplying analysts to the government, and at the same time Mr. Pickersgill was involved in selling to the government. There was a generous so-called offer from McKinsey to serve while at the same time using the access they gained to sell, and they made a lot of money in the process. That is, I see, the core problem that undermines independent, impartial public deliberations about the common good and skews the playing field to the advantage of a well-connected private company.
Today we see the deployment of the McKinsey model again in the case of Mark Carney's appointment as an economic adviser to the Liberal Party, which is, of course, in government for the time being. He is, at the same time, maintaining various leadership positions in the private sector, particularly with Brookfield. It came out that Mark Carney is the sitting chair of Brookfield. At the same time as he's advising the governing party, Brookfield is applying to Ottawa for the creation of this massive multi-billion dollar asset fund that would be extremely advantageous to Brookfield, the company he is in charge of.
I look at what's happening here, from the Dominic Barton corporatist fusing together of government and big business, and then I see the same thing happening again with Mark Carney, and it just brings home the point. After nine years, have these people learned nothing? Maybe they have learned something but they learned the wrong lessons. They learned that they want to further refine this model of bringing together big business and big government to the advantage of a few well-connected elites.
I want to put it to the officials. Do you see a problem with this model, this structure that allowed McKinsey and that is now allowing Brookfield to have a level of access that simply would not be available to any other normal private company?