The consulting firm McKinsey & Company has seen the amount of money it earns from federal contracts explode since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power — to the point where some suggest it may have a central role in shaping Canada’s immigration policies.
A Radio-Canada investigation also learned the private consulting firm’s influence is raising concerns within the federal public service.
According to public accounts data from Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), the Liberals spent 30 times more money on McKinsey’s services than Stephen Harper’s Conservatives did.
In the nine years of the Harper government, McKinsey was awarded $2.2 million in federal contracts. During Trudeau’s seven years in office, the company has received $66 million from the federal government.
McKinsey, an American firm with 30,000 consultants in 130 offices in 65 countries, provides advice to both private and public entities — which sometimes have conflicting interests — and does not disclose its business ties.
For example, Export Development Canada has paid McKinsey $7.3 million to provide various analyses since last year. The Business Development Bank of Canada paid the company $8.8 million for advice in 2021 and 2022.
Major role in immigration department
Radio-Canada’s analysis shows that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has turned to McKinsey the most since 2015, with $24.5 million in contracts for management advice.
IRCC and the Canada Border Services Agency account for 44 per cent of federal compensation issued to the firm.
McKinsey refused to answer Radio-Canada questions regarding its role and agreements with the federal government. The government did not provide copies of the firm’s reports in response to Radio-Canada’s request.
McKinsey’s influence over Canadian immigration policy has grown in recent years without the public’s knowledge, according to two sources within IRCC. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has been McKinsey and Co.’s best customer within the federal government since 2015. (Ivanoh Demers/CBC)
Both held major roles within the department during the height of the consulting firm’s influence and spoke to Radio-Canada separately.
“It was completely opaque. We asked to collaborate, to share our ideas, but it didn’t work,” said one source with an important position within IRCC.
“McKinsey was an idea from the government. The policy was decided for civil servants. It causes a lot of operational instability,” said the second source.
“These people, these firms forget the public interest, they’re not interested in it. They’re not accountable.”
According to contracts, McKinsey was hired by IRCC to develop and implement various strategies for “transformation.”
An IRCC spokesperson said the consulting firm was tasked with reviewing, developing and implementing digital tools, processes and services.
The department spokesperson said the contract was revised during the pandemic — at an increased cost — to help IRCC respond to pressures related to the pandemic, deal with acute demand and maintain essential services for clients.
A mandate for ‘transformation’
Representatives of McKinsey facilitated or attended about 10 meetings of the IRCC transformation committee, according to documents obtained under access to information law. The documents do not include details of those presentations.
“We had a few presentations on very generic, completely vapid stuff. They arrived with nice colours, nice presentations and said they would revolutionize everything,” one of the sources said.
“In the end, we don’t have any idea what they did,” the source added, referring to “nice marketing” that “isn’t science.”
Before a federal committee hearing in late November, IRCC Deputy Minister Christiane Fox said McKinsey was involved in the transformation and modernization of the department’s systems.
“According to managers and politicians, everything that comes from outside is always better, even if we had enough resources internally,” said one department source.
“[McKinsey] always says they have great expertise, but it doesn’t make sense because we have expertise and we’re completely pushed aside,” said the other.
McKinsey head recommended immigration boost
The IRCC sources are also critical of McKinsey’s possible influence over Canada’s immigration targets.
Ottawa announced a plan this fall to welcome 500,000 new permanent residents each year by 2025, with an emphasis on fostering economic growth.
Then-Finance Minister Bill Morneau (right) looks on as Dominic Barton, chair of the Advisory Council on Economic Growth, speaks at a news conference in 2016. Morneau formed the council during his time as finance minister. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)
The advisory council recommended a gradual increase in permanent immigration to 450,000 people per year to respond to labour market dynamics. At the time, Canada was accepting about 320,000 permanent residents.
John McCallum, the immigration minister at the time, expressed his reservations about the “huge figure” presented in the report.
But one of the sources at IRCC said the department was quickly told that the advisory council’s report was a foundational plan.
‘Telling truth to power’
While Dominic Barton chaired the advisory council from 2016 to 2019, he left McKinsey in July 2018 after a 30-year career with the firm. The next month, the consulting firm started its first contract with IRCC.
Trudeau named Barton Canada’s ambassador to China in 2019 — a post he held for two years before leaving and joining the mining firm Rio Tinto.
“I’m very proud of my career and time in the private sector,” Barton said. “We’re known for telling truth to power.”
Barton is also a co-founder of The Century Initiative, an advocacy group calling for policies that would bring Canada’s population to 100 million by 2100.
Dominic Barton was Canada’s ambassador to China from 2019 to 2021 after 30 years at McKinsey. (Paul Chiasson/Canadian Press)
The group was founded in 2011, while Barton was still at McKinsey, and has an current executive from the firm on its board of executives.
The Century Initiative has been listed on Canada’s lobbyist registry since 2021. It has organized meetings with the immigration minister’s office, the minister’s parliamentary secretary and Conservative and NDP MPs.
Radio-Canada’s questions to Barton about the increase in McKinsey’s contracts have not been answered.
Single-source contracts
Departments other than IRCC also have turned to McKinsey.
Public Services and Procurement Canada used the company for computer services. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada hired it for management advice, as well as science and research services.
The Department of National Defence also paid McKinsey several million dollars for leadership development.
Some of these contracts are still in progress and their total cost isn’t known yet.
According to Radio-Canada’s research, PSPC has called upon McKinsey on behalf of various federal entities for 18 contracts since 2021 — contracts worth more than $45 million.
All of those contracts were sole-source, according to documents obtained by Radio-Canada.
The Prime Minister’s Office referred questions to the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS). In a statement, the TBS said external professional services bring in specific expertise and help to address fluctuations in the civil service workload.
According to TBS spokesperson Martin Potvin, such a contract could help fill shortages in certain work groups or geographic locations.
He said the decision to resort to outside firms rests with individual departments.
‘Shadow government’
Benoit Duguay, a professor at the Université de Québec à Montreal’s School of Management Services, said he’s surprised by McKinsey’s apparent influence.
“How come McKInsey has the skills to do absolutely everything a government does? … It looks like another level of government. Almost a supranational government,” Duguay said in French.
(Duguay is a former consultant himself, though not at McKinsey.)
Isabelle Fortier, professor at the École nationale d’administration publique in Quebec, said the use of firms like McKinsey suggests a break between politics and administration of the state.
She said it supplants the internal expertise of the civil service and operates as a “shadow government” without transparency or legitimacy.
The federal government said it employs consulting firms to provide high-quality services and ensure the best possible value for taxpayers. It said departments are required to award contracts in a fair, open and transparent manner.
Controversy and calls for accountability
McKinsey has advised many national governments on their COVID-19 pandemic response in recent years, including those in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Mexico.
The governments of Quebec and Ontario also hired McKinsey to advise them on their pandemic responses and plan for the economic recovery.
McKinsey and Co. was hired to provide advice to the governments of Ontario, Quebec and several countries on pandemic response and recovery. (AFP via Getty Images)
An investigation by the French Senate accused consulting firms like McKinsey of undermining national sovereignty and making the state dependent on them.
McKinsey also has been under investigation in France over tax filings, the awarding of contracts and its role in President Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 and 2022 election campaigns.
In Canada, some experts are also calling for an inquiry.
Ontario lawyer Lou Janssen Dangzalan, who has been studying IRCC’s digital reforms, said an inquiry could provide transparency on how consulting companies handle government contracts.
Fortier, who studied McKinsey’s record in France, said she supports a public inquiry into the use of consulting firms.
“We must force the black boxes to open,” she said in French.
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
