Thank you for that.
Minister, I wrote you a letter in mid-January about outsourcing. I reminded you about your party's commitment in 2015, when your party promised that while in government, they would focus on reducing the use of external consultants. There was an analysis published in The Globe and Mail that said that it's not happening; rather, the use of consultants under your party's watch has increased a staggering 41.8% since your government took power. I want to remind you that this spending has totalled over $12 billion in the 2020-21 year.
Outsourcing and the privatization of public services have time and time again only proven to increase costs, add risk to taxpayers, reduce the quality of services, erode the internal capacity of the public service, create precarious work and undermine initiatives that address pay equity and systemic racism. A report by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada emphasized how your government often initially awards a contract that on the surface offers relatively low cost and value for money, only for the contract costs to be substantially increased once it's been awarded.
There's no greater example of outsourcing failing than the debacle with the Phoenix pay system. It's a scandal that, since its launch five years ago, has still not been successfully resolved by your government. The costs incurred related to the Phoenix pay system were reportedly $560 million. That is now twice as much as the federal government spent to set the system up. It is a system with a stated purpose of generating long-term savings, but it has only managed to outsource its expensive failings to the Canadian taxpayer.
The consultancy firm McKinsey has been contracted by your government to help fix the Phoenix pay system, originally for the cost of $4.9 million, but this contract has now been amended three times. The estimated cost of the contract is now $27.7 million, which is an increase of 565%.
This culture that permeates your government of allowing highly paid consultants to repeatedly change the cost of their work ever upward is not only fiscally irresponsible, but an insult to Canadian taxpayers who work hard and play by the rules. As the President of the Treasury Board, you have the opportunity and ability to stop the government's increasing drive to outsource and privatize public services, which decades of overwhelming evidence has shown will lead to higher costs.
Will you commit to taking an evidence-based approach to public service delivery and ensure that, wherever possible, the government contracts in-house, rather than wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on highly overpaid consultants?