Auditor-General Karen Hogan reported this week on how the federal government handed over control of the administration of a pandemic relief program to a foreign consulting company.
Recommended Videos
In the early days of COVID-19, the government gave responsibility for the Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) to Export Development Canada (EDC), a Crown corporation, which in turn handed over most of the contracts to Dublin-based consulting firm Accenture.
Auditors revealed that from April to November 2023, EDC was paying an average of 14 hours a day to agents at a call centre, despite the call centre only being open nine hours a day. According to Accenture, the extra charges came from “other unreported call-centre agents who were not answering calls, but performing other program-related tasks.”
The auditor found that 92% of CEBA-related contracts were sole-sourced to Accenture and worth $313 million. Another $29 million was split between 29 other contractors.
According to a report by the Fraser Institute, the federal government grew by 26.1% between 2015 and the 2022-23 fiscal year. Despite that massive growth, we’re still farming out lucrative contracts to multinational corporations instead of doing the work in-house.
The Globe and Mail reported this week that EDC’s contracts with Accenture are scheduled to increase to more than $1 billion, according to documents obtained through Freedom of Information.
So, just what is this bloated civil service doing? Did it not occur to anyone, amid this hiring frenzy, to employ people who can actually do the work? Instead, they hired people whose talent seems to be their ability to hire other people to do it. This is reminiscent of the ArriveCAN boondoggle, where Hogan estimates $59 million was spent developing an app the private sector could have produced for a fraction of the cost.
That $1 billion is money that would be better spent on border security or defence. As we lavish money on private-sector contractors, we cry poor when it comes to beefing up our Canadian Armed Forces.
It’s time to get our spending priorities straight. We nickel and dime our frontline soldiers while private-sector contractors dine out on millions of taxpayer dollars.