Joe Oliver, CFIB, and the Fraser Institute

FinMin Joe Oliver admitted last week that his department had outsourced government policy to the lobby group Canadian Federation of Independent Business, and further, had not done their own analysis of CFIB's work even though the lobby group represents the businesses the new policy was intended to benefit. The new CFIB/FinMin policy takes $500M from the EI fund and gives it to small businesses - ostensibly to create jobs.

CFIB wasted no time taking credit for this piece of government policy.

On their webpage CFIB shows this photo of CFIB President Dan Kelly at the government's "Jobs and Opportunities" dedecked lectern, with FinMin Joe standing demurely off to the side. 
A sidebar on the main page headlined "We Make a Difference - Victories" boasts :
"Big breakthrough on payroll taxes: CFIB joined federal Finance Minister Joe Oliver to announce the creation of the Small Business Job Credit".

CFIB certainly has the right to flaunt their influence over Con policy. 

Two and a half years ago, they announced their success in lobbying the government "to make the Temporary Foreign Worker Program more responsive to the needs of employers", including a 10-day response time to LMOs, "a simplified online application process", and "a new more flexible wage structure". 

And lo, Human Resources Minister Diane FInley made it so.

In fact, over the past four years from Nov 2010 to Nov 2014, Con MPs have quoted the CFIB more than 280 times in the House and in committee on everything from the Wheat Board to Canada Post to the temporary foreign workers program to federal budgets.

Here's a few from one week this past October :

With CEO Dan Kelly sitting on the Advisory Committee to the Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, the CFIB currently have 46 lobbyists listed to lobby 39 separate government institutions on 28 matters of policy for the year 2014, including "fair access to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program" and "support for Bill C525 (An Act to amend the Canada Labour Code) that secret ballot voting should be mandatory prior to union certification."

At left, also from Press Progress, is the short version of the apparently joint $550M CFIB/FinMin EI policy. 
Estimated to create 25,000 person-years of employment over the next several years, this figure was later corrected by the parliamentary budget officer to 800 jobs at a cost of $687,500 per job.


However CFIB President Dan Kelly explains the whole jobs jobs jobs thing wasn't even the point :

"The job-creation benefit of it is essentially secondary to the fact that this is essentially an EI cut because employers and employees should not have to pay higher EI premiums than is needed to pay for the cost of the program. So this is essentially returning EI rates back to their break-even level."

No fault to the CFIB here - they're just doing their job for their guys, 109,000 small and medium Canadian businesses and franchises.

Perhaps notable though is that according to their Contact page, the CFIB Exec Vice President was formerly Director of Environment and Regulatory Studies at the Koch-funded Fraser Institute while the VP of Communications interned there.

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Cons : "Well you didn't ask us."

In response to NDP questions on Monday regarding the missing $3.1 billion in public security and anti-terrorism spending and why even the words "public security and anti-terrorism" hadn't shown up in nine years of public accounts, Tony Gazebo of the Treasury Board blamed the opposition for not guessing the right question :

“If NDP caucus members from the years from 2001 to 2009 did not ask the right questions then that is their problem, not the problem on this side of the House.”

In February, Public SafetyMin Vic Toews used the same tactic. When questioned as to how the Cons managed to appoint Dr Arthur Porter - subject of an arrest warrant for fraud, money laundering and bribes/kickbacks in connection with SNC Lavelin - to head up the CSIS watchdog agency SIRC in 2010 without doing a sufficiently diligent security clearance on him first, Toews blamed the opposition parties for not stopping them from appointing a crook by not asking the right question :

"If there were any concerns that he had, he could have brought it to the attention of the appropriate authorities and simply asked the question. He failed in his responsibilities."

So from now on, all the opposition has to do is to try to guess which right questions are cleverly hidden under the Con security blanket.

Noon update : And even when reporters ask Tony Gazebo the right questions about government outsourcing ...

Star investigation: Millions in taxpayer-funded consulting work kept secret

A Star investigation has found 90 per cent of the $2.4 billion paid out in the past decade comes with no description of the work done — and more than a dozen departments refuse to provide details when pressed.

The Tax Free Tour - tax havens and outsourcing

A doc about the stateless offshore world of tax havens. 

Why does Apple only pay 1.9% tax?
The Big Four : Price Waterhouse Coopers, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG

Former KPMG man : "They are the constant feature of every tax haven. Without one of those firms, or maybe all of those firms being present, you really will not have a tax haven."

He describes how the Big Four as he calls them are hired by governments to guide financial rules that benefit the Big Four.

So remember back in Sept 2011 when Steve gave Deloitte a $20-million contract to advise federal cabinet and senior officials on how to trim $4 billion from government program spending in order to balance the books by 2014?  

Ah -an outsourcing firm is being hired to recommend more outsourcing we said at the time, remembering a 2010 CBC report on the 80% increase in a parallel civil service made up of consulting firms.

At the same time, Deloitte, CORE-outsourcing, and Ryerson's Ted Rogers School of Management teamed up to produce a joint research initiative using Deloitte's "proprietary outsourcing maturity model". It was called The 3 E's of Effective Outsourcing Governance -Experience, Essentials, and Empathy -because that sounds better than Externalizing accountability, Eff Off Unions, and Economic entropy.

They projected that "almost $25 billion worth of outsourcing contracts in Canada [are] to be renewed or renegotiated over the next three years."

Pictured at the top of their 3 E's report are Ray Lavitt, President of CORE; Ian Chan, Principal at Deloitte; and Ron Babin, Professor at Ryerson.  
All three have outsourcing and/or offshoring creds : 

• Lavitt was "VP, Global Sourcing at CIBC" before becoming CEO of CORE
• Chan is "Leader of Deloitte Canada's Outsourcing Advisory Practice" and 
• Babin was "a partner at Accenture and at KPMG", according to his Ryerson bio, and "his area of research is IT Planning and IT Governance with a specific focus on IT outsourcing and off-shore delivery."

Lavitt and Babin featured in an article a month ago at CBC : Offshore outsourcing 'not always a negative thing'

Lavitt is President of CORE; Chan and Babin are CORE board members.

So how did Steve's outsourcing report from Deloitte work out for us?
FinMin Jim Flaherty announced a trim to Ottawa’s annual spending by $5 billion a year in budget cutbacks in programs and services to eliminate the $26-billion deficit by 2015.

As of Dec. 31, 2012, 16,220 public service positions were eliminated, even though according to Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in 2011 :

Over the past five years, personnel outsourcing costs have risen 79%. While federal departments have had their budgets capped, expenditures on outside consultants have not been touched and remain above $1 billion a year,” says Macdonald.

Wednesday May 8 update : 

Star investigation: Millions in taxpayer-funded consulting work kept secret

A Star investigation has found 90 per cent of the $2.4 billion paid out in the past decade comes with no description of the work done — and more than a dozen departments refuse to provide details when pressed.

Thursday May 9 update :
Hundreds of public servants at seven departments received notices today that their jobs are on the block as part of the Conservative government’s ongoing spending cuts

Watch the doc. 
See also International Consortium of Investigative Journalists/offshore
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The invisible hand of the market outsourcing

CBC Go Public's Kathy Tomlinson on The Current :

 "A single mom, an experienced IT worker, couldn't find work for seven months. She heard one of the Indian firms had a project going at one of the banks here so she asked the manager who she knew who was here from India to hire her to oversee it. He said he'd think about it. Then she says he called back to say he would give her the job if she would agree to kickback $8 an hour from her salary to him - a cash commission, he called it. She took the deal because she says she'd rather pay him to work than not have the job."

So Canadians are now having to pay off the insourced scam artists who cost them their jobs to get work at all, even as foreign temporary workers have increased 700% since 2001 and Ottawa is currently inking a trade deal with India to increase labour mobility.

Jason Kenney : 

"Intra-company transfers in the vast majority of cases are a completely normal part of international commerce ... The obligations we have have for intra-company transfars are often hard-wired into trade agreements."

Conspokesbot Kellie Leitch, parlsec for Diane Finley of Human Resources, responds to Anna Maria Tremonti's specific question about companies bypassing government labour market opinions to get fast-tracked on international intra-company transfers :

"The program's intent is not to replace Canadian workers ... We had concerns with respect to what was happening with iGATE and the government acted extremely quickly to begin an investigation to make sure that those labour market opinions were being used appropriately."

which of course entirely bypassed Tremonti's question about employers bypassing LMOs.

Meanwhile in February this year the BC Government Labour Market and Immigration Division was holding classes on how to do it :
(italics mine)

"Is your business experiencing a labour or skills shortage?

If you are an employer interested in learning how to use an alternative approach than the LMO process to recruit and retain foreign workers, this is your chance to find out directly from program staff. "

I guess the BC gov program staff is pretty good at it.
At the now cancelled April 2013 CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing? sponsored by IBM, HP, and iGATE, one of the listed presenters was 
C.J. Ritchie, Asst Deputy Minister, 
Strategic Partnerships Office, Government of British Columbia, 
whose CORE bio advertized provided "leadership to BC’s $5.8-billion portfolio of outsourcing contracts".

And a year ago, the Ontario Ministry of Transportation finalized a $22-million deal with iGATE to provide IT workers for its Road User Safety Modernization Initiative, the department in charge of "road user safety, provincial highways management, and transportation policy and planning including transit." 

Last month iGATE hired a lobbyist to lobby :

• Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA)
• Canada Revenue Agency (CRA)
• Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC)
• Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC)
• Industry Canada (IC)
• Prime Minister's Office (PMO)
• Privy Council Office (PCO

on "the Temporary Foreign Workers Program and proposed government changes to the program."

We'll see how well they do with that.

Northern Reflections : One May Smile  and Smile

with files from : Boycott Royal Bank of Canada and Outsource Canada
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Update : Wednesday, May 8 :

Star investigation: Millions in taxpayer-funded consulting work kept secret

A Star investigation has found 90 per cent of the $2.4 billion paid out in the past decade comes with no description of the work done — and more than a dozen departments refuse to provide details when pressed.

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$93K a day for advice on outsourcing government

"Trained economist" Stephen Harper has given Deloitte, the world's largest accounting and consulting and outsourcing firm with $28.8 billion in profits for 2011 , a $19.8-million contract to advise federal cabinet and senior officials on how to trim $4 billion from government program spending in order to balance the books by 2014.
The contract runs till March 31, 2013, with an option for a one-year extension

New Conservative Party motto : You have to spend money to save money.

Back in December, CBC ran a story on the ballooning of a parallel civil service made up of consulting firms.

"... preliminary findings show that over the past five years, the cost of outsourcing has ballooned by at least 80 per cent. Estimates reveal the government is spending billions of dollars a year on professional services.

"I've been in environments where there are 80 consultants and 10 staff or 20 staff and we outnumber them and that's a very different experience from when you're the two or three token consultants," said Gordon Martin, a senior analyst and technical architect who is one of the thousands of people who works as a contractor for the government.

Alex Beraskow, who runs a consulting firm specializing in IT and management, said the use of consultants by the government is a huge business.

"It's the single largest market in Canada for professional services. It's what we call a sunrise industry rather than a sunset industry," said Beraskow.

Maurice Chenier, chief executive officer of the Information Technology Services Branch at Public Works, noted that about a third of the staff in his department are consultants."

Billions of dollars a year on consultants. Do you think Deloitte is likely to recommend $4B less of them?

Update : Deloitte has consulted on a number of other issues both within Canada and worldwide : water privatization, massaging the tarsands image.

Earlier this year in conjunction with Public Policy Forum they published Innovation in Government? Conversations with Canada's Public Service Leaders - about 100 of them, mostly deputy ministers.

A June 23 2011 interview on Business News Network - Innovation and Re-making the Canadian Government - introduced Deloitte Global Director William Eggers as someone who has "been coming up here four or five times a year for years" to advise government on "efficiencies".
Yes, he said, he's been up here so many times he's joked with Canadian government officials that he should be made an honorary Canadian citizen by now. Eggers :

"I used to lead something called the Texas Performance Review and our job was just to go in and find anywhere from a billion to two billion dollars each biennial of savings ... you know what we did? We looked all over the world for good ideas in business that we could connect back to government."

Hey, if it's good enough for Texas, it's good enough for Steve.
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