In early June, Canadian auditor general Karen Hogan issued a report into the federal government’s habit of contracting out services to global consulting firm McKinsey & Company. She found that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s administration violated its own procurement policies in its dealings with McKinsey.

Hogan also discovered that Trudeau’s Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper, violated procurement norms when contracting services to McKinsey, but that the quantity of McKinsey contracts vastly increased once Trudeau came to power.

In February 2023, a parliamentary motion unanimously tasked the auditor general (AG) with examining McKinsey contracts to determine whether the government complied with federal procurement regulations and received value for its money. Deeper questions, such as why the government is so keen to award private sector contracts to deliver public services, and what it says about the role of the state under neoliberalism, were elided by the AG investigation’s limited scope.