Government Operations Committee on June 5th, 2023

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for being here today.

My Conservative colleagues and I, unlike the Liberal and NDP coalition, believe that our mission should actually be Canadians and their money.

This is why we asked for these documents, because we believed.... This, to me, is such a typical bureaucratic response: Canadians aren't smart enough to know where their money is going. That is so incredibly unfortunate. We asked for these documents, so that we could see the expenditures of these departments with McKinsey & Company, but, in fact, it's no surprise we received so many redacted documents.

If I look at the unredacted documents we did receive, from the BDC we see that McKinsey charged half a million dollars for five weeks of work for a strategic study. We see that McKinsey charged $160,000 per week for four weeks of work for an IT strategy. We see that McKinsey received $3 million for four months of work for an advanced analytics and artificial intelligence project. That's a lot of money. We see that McKinsey & Company received $2.9 million for four and a half months of work for a transformational launch. Finally, from BDC, we see that McKinsey & Company was paid $2.9 million for 12 weeks of work. That's $240,000 per week of work.

This is at a time when Canadians are in a cost of living crisis. A recent survey by H&R Block found that 52% of Canadians feel that they don't have enough money left until the end of the month, and that 46% of Canadians feel that they are on the brink of insolvency, defined as being $200 or less away from being able to meet their financial obligations. One in five Canadians said they were very likely to obtain meals from a food bank. A survey from the University of Saskatchewan suggested that 20% of Canadians are skipping meals to cut down on food. Someone somewhere is missing breakfast, lunch or dinner, while we are having these types of expenditures.

I will ask a question of Madam Hudon from BDC.

How can you possibly justify these large amounts, when Canadians are struggling?

[Isabelle Hudon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Business Development Bank of Canada]

Thank you very much.

I know that the amounts you mentioned are investments by the BDC. That said, they should be considered as part of the investments in consulting firms for strategic reflection work on important projects...

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

I've heard enough. I'll move on.

Thank you very much, Madam Hudon.

I'll go on to IRCC. I see a total contract of half a million dollars, where a project leader received $73,000 for an unspecified number of days of work. We don't know if they worked one day, two days or three days to get that $73,000. We see a subject matter expert received $74,000, also for an unspecified number of days of work.

In a moment, I'll ask Madam Fox how many days they worked to receive those huge amounts of money, but we may never know. I have this chart right here, in fact, where we have large amounts of money from IRCC where there are no estimated number of days required. How many days did the business consultant work to receive $390,000? We don't know. How many days did the project manager work to receive $195,000? We don't know. How many days did they all work to receive $700,000 of taxpayers' money? Who led the plan for next week? We'll never know, because that name from IRCC is redacted as well.

I'll close by pointing out that from EDC, as well, McKinsey consultants charged EDC a weekly service fee of $216,250 for 10 weeks of work. We require these documents. It's our parliamentary right to have these documents, but more importantly, Canadians deserve these documents.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thanks, Ms. Kusie.

We'll go to Ms. Thompson, please, for five minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses.

Certainly, it's an important committee today, because we need to understand why the documents were redacted and, in many instances, why we didn't receive the documents.

Mr. Shea, thank you for making yourself available as the main witness here. I will direct my question to you.

The McKinsey study's production of papers is uniquely large, and it covers over a decade of contracts with the company McKinsey. How many pages of documents in total do you estimate will be provided to the committee once all of the departments, agencies and Crown corporations have reported back to this committee?

Do you have any sense of what the cost is?

[Matthew Shea]

I do not have an estimate of the cost. I think each individual department may or may not have that, depending on how they track their translation costs, which would be one of the major costs. Obviously, we do not always track the work of each individual employee against different projects. You may never be able to get that full cost.

In terms of the number of pages, the number I've heard was 220,000 pages in total. I can return and confirm that number once I talk to other departments, but that's my understanding of the total number that we're talking about.

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

Thank you.

Clearly, this volume of documentation takes a tremendous number of resources, and I realize that number would go across the different departments.

Do you feel that this request has negatively impacted on government services that Canadians rely on?

[Matthew Shea]

I can only speak for PCO. It has not negatively impacted our services to Canadians.

What any of these requests does is take away resources that could be working on things like access to information for Canadians to access other types of documents, because so many of the same people work on it. Where possible, we reallocate from other priorities to be able to have surge capacity, but absolutely, there's an impact on our ability to respond to other access requests from typical Canadians.

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

Thank you.

Can you indicate in a general way the amount of time that's been spent providing documents for this study, and a sense of the other work that you referenced a moment ago? Is there other work that would have been put to the side during the time needed to fill the request?

[Matthew Shea]

For PCO, it would not be a significant impact. We are talking about one contract and 280 pages, plus or minus. It would certainly work. We had to do translation and we had to do the redactions, but as I mentioned, there are not many redactions.

I can't claim that this has been a huge burden on us. However, there are others at this table who had larger production orders, and this would certainly impact their businesses far more than ours.

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

Thank you.

Would anyone like to speak to the impact?

Yes, Ms. Fox. Go ahead.

[Christiane Fox]

I can give the committee a sense of scale for IRCC.

In total, we submitted about 23,000 pages in both official languages, and we had about 50 people working on the submission on the various tranches throughout this process. There were seven core team members who were involved in all of the activities on a full-time basis, but then there was a network of others—including me—who reviewed every tranche that came to this committee.

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

Could you provide the committee with any information on what impact this had on the ongoing work within your department?

[Christiane Fox]

What I would say is that we take these requests extremely seriously, and we will dedicate the resources required in order to fulfill the request by the committee. We also limited the redactions. I think it is still important for us to dedicate those resources and, yes, to pull them away from their other responsibilities to take a look at ensuring that we're not releasing personal information. Banking information is something we found in tranche two of what we submitted.

The exercise of going through all those details is an important one and one we take very seriously. Yes, we did pull people away from their day-to-day work to be able to submit, but we do think it is very important to do that.

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

Thank you.

I'll go to Mr. Matthews and then back to Ms. Fox with the same question. Did the labour disruptions from the recent strike impact the work requests?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

I'm afraid you only have about five seconds, so perhaps you could provide that in writing to us or answer in a later round.

Ms. Vignola, you have two and a half minutes, please.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Leduc, I know your organization has very sensitive information and that you need to have the confidence not only of Quebec and of the provinces, but also of other countries.

How many actuaries does your organization have on the payroll right now?

[Michel Leduc]

We do not have an actuarial services division, properly speaking. We have professional actuaries, who work on our files and take part in our projects, but we do not really have an actuarial services division. The actuarial work is done independently by the office of the chief actuary.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

So your organization does not have any actuaries on hand to provide investment advice. Ultimately, they are all consultants. Was that McKinsey's role?

[Michel Leduc]

No. McKinsey's role is to advise us on the investments we make around the world. If we invest in a company, we want to negotiate the best price possible for Canadians. McKinsey helps us obtain the best information possible to determine how to take advantage of investment opportunities.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Okay, thank you.

Ms. Hudon, I have a fairly simple question. Is it normal for members of your organization to use their personal email address when writing to outside parties, including McKinsey, and to use their nicknames, such as Joe instead of Joseph? Is it standard practice for members of your organization to use their personal email address to send messages?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Give a very brief answer, please.

[Isabelle Hudon]

BDC addresses are used for professional email correspondence.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Okay, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thanks.

Mr. Johns, after your two and a half minutes, we will suspend to go and vote.

Go ahead, Mr. Johns.