Liberal favoured McKinsey faces being run over

National Post, 22 January 2023

The Liberals are now the party of the one per cent, of which McKinsey is a flagship firm.

A year ago the truckers were on the move toward Ottawa. Who would have thought that McKinsey & Company might get run over?

To be sure, McKinsey is a behemoth of the international consulting class. Once upon a time Tom Wolfe would have considered them “masters of the universe.” More recently, they are considered part of that permanent governing class that gathered at Davos this past week. Firms so formidable don’t get run over.

Until they do. Remember Arthur Andersen? Don’t forget Lehman Brothers. McKinsey is not toppling, but troubles are mounting up.

McKinsey is in trouble in France, subject to a criminal probe for their activity in the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections. People are wondering whether there might be connection between that and McKinsey not paying much tax.

McKinsey is in trouble in South Africa, facing criminal charges in a massive railway corruption scandal.

McKinsey has been in trouble for its work in Saudi Arabia, where its social media surveys helped the regime crack down on dissidents.

McKinsey has already been in trouble in the United States, paying a $600 million fine designing strategies for Big Pharma to get more patients addicted to opioids. McKinsey pushed drugs it knew would kill.

McKinsey should be in trouble for what it does in China, cozying up to a brutal regime, even staging its luxurious retreat for senior managers in walking distance from communist concentration camps for Uyghur Muslims.

But certainly McKinsey would never be in trouble in Canada, where its close relationship with Justin Trudeau would protect it? From the beginning of his government, Trudeau has given McKinsey an outsized role in policy advice. We now know that it has been shoveling lucrative contracts to McKinsey.

Enter the truckers, who rolled into Ottawa last year with the prime minister and his pandemic policies as the object of their ire. They did hurt his standing as a competent manager and as a nation builder, and his historic position will be seriously marred by his decision to suspend civil liberties to rifle through the bank accounts of Canadians who held “unacceptable” views.

The prime minister remained standing though. The truckers actually took out Erin O’Toole, the Conservative leader of the opposition. The tectonic plates were shifting under his feet and he lost his balance.

We can now see where those plates are realigning. O’Toole’s successor, Pierre Poilievre, has led the charge demanding parliamentary hearings to discover why Trudeau’s cabinet has awarded McKinsey so many sole-sourced contracts. Backed by the other opposition parties, McKinsey will have to answer public questions about its intimate relationship with the prime minister.

Continue reading at the National Post.