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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 337

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
September 17, 2024 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 337 - Sep/17/24
Ms. Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné
  • Sep/17/24 11:53:17 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, there is indeed a problem, but it does not necessarily involve hiring consultants. It is normal to hire consultants. Experts are occasionally needed to assist the government on an ad hoc basis. The problem is that the size of the public service increased dramatically. A huge number of public servants were hired, and many more consultants were hired as well. Consulting expenses went through the roof. How is it that this expertise is lacking within the government? Have we not created a sort of federal dependency on consultants, who end up having their contracts renewed, while internal expertise falls by the wayside? This is what I mean when I talk about a procurement problem.
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Context: House Hansard - 337 - Sep/17/24
Ms. Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné
  • Sep/17/24 11:55:16 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I can only reiterate what I said earlier. The problem is that the size of the public service exploded, but so did the number of contracts awarded to consultants. Finally, we are potentially paying twice for the same services. We know that sometimes a department is equipped to provide a service and another department hires consultants to do it. This happens regularly within the federal government.
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Context: House Hansard - 337 - Sep/17/24
Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP)
  • Sep/17/24 12:23:21 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think what the Canadian public is screaming about is the sense that there is never any accountability, that millions of dollars can be wasted and that we can have someone like Kristian Firth sit here and say he is not ashamed, that he just took millions of dollars from Canadians and he is walking away with it. I think the hon. member for Windsor West is absolutely right. We have to get back to where this started as a trend of taking work that should be done by our public civil service and farming it out to for-profit consultants. I would like to put a finger on the beginning of it, and maybe if we had accountability for that, we could get accountability now. I put my finger on the Phoenix pay system and the decision to hire IBM. We should have sued IBM when it was not delivering, instead of shovelling hundreds of millions of dollars more to it, and then to McKinsey, to help the Phoenix pay system work when it could never work.
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Context: House Hansard - 337 - Sep/17/24
Mr. Damien Kurek
  • Sep/17/24 12:41:46 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I talk a lot about the need for good governance. We often see examples from the Liberals that are the antithesis of that. I know the member and his party are open to continuing this coalition-type arrangement that exists here. I would hope the member would stand strongly against supporting the corruption we see across the way. However, at the very base of all of this is what has happened over the last 10 or so years. Consultants have been used in government for as long as government has existed, but the proliferation of that under the Liberals, the $20 billion that has been spent on consultants, is not resulting in good policy; it is not resulting in benefits or services being offered to Canadians. We need that basic level of accountability, but the Liberals simply refuse it.
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