Government Operations Committee on Feb. 1st, 2023

[Dominic Barton]

Yes. I can't speak to what Minister Freeland says about the relationship. I'm telling you about what my.... I know what the relationship is with the Prime Minister, and I'm telling you that it was a professional relationship.

I'm honestly quite shocked at what I'm reading about in the papers. It's incredible. He must find it incredible, because it's simply not true. It was a professional relationship. There was respect. There were always people in the room. That's what it was. I don't know what people's definition of that is.

That's the part I find a little disappointing.

[Joanne Thompson, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Barton. I promise I won't ask how many times you've spoken to the Prime Minister.

I would like to learn some of your perspective on transparency and the data metrics, because I think you have worked for multiple governments and other countries. I'd be really interested in hearing what it is we need to put in place to ensure that we don't end up, through successive governments, back in a place where outsourcing is this challenging and obviously worrisome when we look at the numbers.

[Dominic Barton]

This is where the civil service has to play a role, too, in terms of what it wants and what it finds frustrating. I've had two and a half years in the civil service, and I would say that I'm deeply impressed with the quality of people. Deeply. They work incredibly hard; they have high standards and they've been overwhelmed in the last five years. There's been a heck of a lot of stuff happening. The thing is to also ask them what we should be doing in terms of training.

My personal view is that the human resource systems are weak, if I'm blunt about it. They're weak in terms of the training, the career pathing and the mentoring that goes on, yet we have really good people.

We should be looking at how we can further develop their roles and what they do to build the capacity. That's fundamentally what I believe. I think we should involve them, because they will see where it is. Ultimately, they're making decisions, but I think the nature of the work has shifted over the last five years.

[Joanne Thompson, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Could you elaborate on that?

[Dominic Barton]

Sure.

First of all, just the number of issues that are being dealt with at any particular time.... I saw it in foreign affairs. You have to move 60,000 Canadians from different parts of the world. That's not been done before.

When I was there, we established a supply chain for PPE. That's not in the book. When you become a diplomat, it's not supposed to say, “You build a supply chain.” We had to figure that out. That was from China. At one particular point, 93% of our PPE supply came from China. Deloitte helped. Deloitte played a role, but it was actually civil servants who were doing that. There were tons of other issues going on at the same time.

There's a huge workload that we need to look at. I think the speed with which information moves.... There's not time to be able to absorb and think. You have to react very quickly. There's not enough time to get ahead for the next issue that comes along.

You then have the whole digitization. This is something that's happening to every organization. Customers expect it. They get it from their retailers and they expect it from government, but frankly, we have some quite decrepit systems that have to be shifted. That's a lot of work to be able to do it.

We have to look at some of those elements that are putting pressure on the civil servants and their ability to do their job. I think that would be a very productive process.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

That's your time, Ms. Thompson.

[Joanne Thompson, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Mr. Blanchet, you have two and a half minutes, please.

[Yves-François Blanchet, Bloc, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

I'll be brief. First of all, I don't want to refer to a specific contract because it has obviously been a long time and you've forgotten some bits here and there. Nevertheless, you were the CEO of McKinsey and you know how it works.

Within the overall relationship between McKinsey and the Canadian government, were you the contractee working to improve things or setting targets in areas like immigration?

[Dominic Barton]

I have two responses.

First of all, as the head of McKinsey, you don't get involved in contracts. You don't do client work. For nine years—

[Yves-François Blanchet, Bloc, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

But you know how it all works.

[Dominic Barton]

No, I didn't. I also didn't work in government. I worked in banking and consumer goods, not in the government process.

I'm sorry. What was your second point? It was setting targets.

[Yves-François Blanchet, Bloc, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

Yes.

[Dominic Barton]

What happened was the growth council recognized that one of the levers for Canada to be able to be prosperous in the future was labour supply. It was a big gap. The view was we needed to increase the amount of immigration that was going on.

There was a huge debate within the growth council. There were 14 members arguing back and forth. There were some who thought it should be way higher and there were some on the committee who thought we should be very careful about bringing in any more new people. It was a debate.

What we did was we made a recommendation, and then it was up to the government to decide whether to do it or not.

[Yves-François Blanchet, Bloc, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

That's very interesting, and it was pointed out several times that McKinsey didn't make decisions, but rather recommendations.

The Century Initiative provided advice to the government and the government decided whether or not to follow it. If recommendations were harmful to Quebec, for example, because there is nothing about maintaining a national identity in Quebec, McKinsey is not responsible. I understand clearly that it's Justin Trudeau and his government who are responsible for whatever is wrong in what they adopted from among your many proposals.

[Dominic Barton]

There are two things I would say about that.

First of all, the growth council made a recommendation. It's up to the government to do it. We made some other recommendations, by the way, that they didn't want to do. They said no, and we pushed—

[Yves-François Blanchet, Bloc, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

Nevertheless, the government accepted everything that amounted to interference in Quebec's areas of jurisdiction, which is something you may not have been aware of.

You could have said that you didn't want to go there to avoid interfering in Quebec's fields of jurisdiction, such as professional training and other areas. Maintaining a Quebec identity is important.

Was that taken into consideration? Did anyone express doubts at some point?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Give a very brief answer, please.

[Dominic Barton]

There was debate on that. A recommendation was made. It was up to the government to decide how it wanted to do it—numbers, where, how, the integration. That was over to the government.

[Yves-François Blanchet, Bloc, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

So it's the government's fault.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

I'm afraid that's our time.

We have Mr. Johns, please, for two and a half minutes.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

In 2011 there was $54 million in outsourcing. In 2015 that had doubled under the Conservatives to $99 million. In 2021 it had gone up fourfold.

You've given voluntary advice to the government. You're deeply impressed with the quality of the civil service. So am I. Did you give any advice on how to stop the out-of-control outsourcing?

[Dominic Barton]

We didn't see that number. We were looking at how we could improve the average median income for the middle class. That was our focus. We were looking at macroeconomic issues; we weren't looking at the effectiveness of government.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

I'm sure you're aware that three out of 23 contracts awarded to McKinsey were subject to the competitive process usually required for such contracts. The remaining 20 contracts were sole-sourced.

For at least 18 of those, a spokesperson for PSPC said that this was necessary, because it was the only way the government could have access to a type of benchmarking methodology that McKinsey has exclusive rights to. PSPC said, “These services consist of functional tools, databases, and expert support to measure their performance against similar Canadian and international organizations in order to identify deficiencies and opportunities for improvement.”

It sounds like a whole lot of words just to say “comparative analysis” to me. Can you maybe explain why this benchmarking methodology is so unique, and why it has the government convinced with absolute certainty—without any attempt to invite competition—that no other company could possibly provide a similar service?

[Dominic Barton]

The first thing I want to say is that I have different numbers from yours about those percentages. The numbers I saw from McKinsey were that 74% were done on the competitive request for proposal basis and 26% were done with a standing order process—where, again, there are a set of criteria.

The second thing is that it's up to the government to decide what those criteria are. McKinsey doesn't set that up. The criteria would have to include capability.

I might also mention that McKinsey's quite an expensive firm. I admit that. That means that if you're going to even be on there, then you'd better have something that's distinctive. When I was at McKinsey, the R and D budget was about $500 million a year. That's $500 million a year—