"Transparency"

 Naturally:

After I repeatedly asked Minister Anand which other countries retained McKinsey to do work for their departments of defence, the Chief of Defence Staff chimed in to try to help. He acknowledged that he also did not know which other defence departments McKinsey had worked for, but said: “when these companies work with our allies, we can garner that sort of expertise to help us out ourselves.” This was a striking comment, insofar as it was an admission by the Chief of Defence Staff that McKinsey is able to learn information working for a defence client which they then apply in their work for another defence client. Surely we can find consultants or other methods that help us learn about the approaches of our allies without worrying that those third party consultants are also working with Moscow and Beijing. With McKinsey, we are flying blind. 

Trying to help further with the government’s defence, the Deputy Minister declared: “The nature of the work is not sensitive. It’s HR, benchmarking and data.” The problem with this claim is that the government has still refused to release details of these contracts to the committee trying to study them. The government implicitly acknowledges that lessons learned through working with our defence department could be applied in other ‘client engagements’, dismisses concerns by saying that the information is not that sensitive, and still will not share the apparently “not sensitive” information with Canadian Parliamentarians. 

This testimony further underlines that the government’s relationship with McKinsey stinks. We need to continue to fight to access all of the necessary documents and get to the bottom of what is happening.