Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Barton, if I've understood correctly what's been said so far, McKinsey's method is basically to give free advice and, once it's got its foot in the door, to create a dependency relationship in order to reap maximum profits—a bit like a drug dealer who offers a customer the first hit for free.
Let's go back in time. In March 2018, after the Canada Infrastructure Bank was created, McKinsey made an offer to work as a consultant for the bank. McKinsey indicated that, thanks to its past work with the bank, it had a deep understanding of the bank and the important context surrounding it, as well as its objectives. This suggests that your work, and the secretariat McKinsey provided to the Advisory Council on Economic Growth, may have served to pad McKinsey's offer to work for the bank.
In fact, it also explains the reasons behind some of Mr. Michael Sabia's decisions. At his most recent committee appearance, he revealed to us that when he was chair of the board of directors of the Canada Infrastructure Bank, in order to get the bank out of difficulty, he awarded a $1.4‑million contract to McKinsey with no call for tenders. His justification for that decision was that it was advantageous to use some of the McKinsey people who had been involved in conceiving the bank, to draw on their accumulated knowledge.
I find that interesting, Mr. Barton. In the end, your volunteerism and that of McKinsey helped change the bank's direction. In a way, it veered the bank away from what was set out in the Liberal platform, where the idea had come from, and put the bank more at the service of the private sector. What's more, that enabled you to go out and win more contracts for McKinsey. What do you think of that?