Thank you, President Carr.
My name is Jordan McAuley. I'm a data analyst at PIPSC. I've been working with the proactive disclosure data for at least five years now. I'd like to reiterate some of the things that were said in the last meeting.
There are serious data quality issues. We are very aware these are estimates and not precise figures necessarily. Looking at it closely enough, you can definitely identify certain trends. There are three that I would like to point out within the context of this hearing.
First, as President Carr alluded to, this was a problem going back far beyond 2015. There were years during the Harper government where spending on consultants approached a billion dollars a year. Specifically, we looked at IT consultants, management consultants and temporary help services. We think those three categories of consulting best represent personnel outsourcing, which is what we're most particularly concerned with.
The second point is that, since the Liberal government came in, in 2015, the problem has gotten worse. That's despite the commitment by the Prime Minister, when he was campaigning, to reduce outsourcing spending to 2006 levels. We see no indication in the data that this was a serious commitment. The spending, especially on IT, has continued to grow each year. Overall, the numbers look like they have roughly doubled between 2015 and 2022 in those three categories of consultants.
Lastly, on the $150 million of contracts that went to McKinsey, although it's great in that it got us here to have this discussion, it's very small relative to large IT contracts. I know that was discussed in the last meeting. A company like IBM, for instance, in 2016 received more than double what McKinsey did over an eight-year period in a single year. That's just for IT consultants.
Looking at the data and what we've been tracking over a number of years now shows that the scope of this problem goes far beyond McKinsey or any one company.