It is not only in France that the connections between the heads of state and McKinsey are being imitated. The Office of the Auditor General of Canada, which corresponds to France’s Court of Accounts, will investigate the contracts awarded to the consultancy by Justin Trudeau’s government, he told AFP on Friday. “The Office of the Auditor General has informed Parliament that the review will begin,” said Speaker Vincent Frigon. The scope of this audit has not yet been determined, he added.

In recent months, the Conservatives (opposition) have called for this investigation to shed light on these treaties, which they say have seen a large “proliferation” since 2015, when Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party came to power have. Conservative MP Garnett Genuis recently denounced “the enormous sum of money” paid to the company since that date, which would exceed CA$100 million.

links for clarification

The conservative opposition also wants to clarify the links between Justin Trudeau and former McKinsey boss Dominic Barton, whom they accuse of being close friends. Dominic Barton served as McKinsey’s CEO from 2009 to 2018 and then served as Canada’s Ambassador to China from 2019 to 2021. In particular, he helped defuse the diplomatic crisis between the two countries related to Canada’s arrest at the request of the United States, Huawei’s finance director Meng Wanzhou in 2018 and negotiated the release of the two Canadians detained in China.

Dominic Barton, who was recently ordered to testify before a parliamentary commission, was questioned about the role of McKinsey, who has been accused of contributing to the opiate crisis in the United States, his deals with the Canadian government and his ties to Justin Trudeau. “I’m not a close personal friend of the Prime Minister,” he pounded. “Since I moved to Asia in 1996, I haven’t been involved with the federal government placing paid contracts with McKinsey,” he said.

A study by Carleton University in Ottawa found that the overall value of contracts awarded to McKinsey still paled in comparison to those awarded to other companies such as Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC. In France, searches were carried out at the homes of McKinsey leaders and former leaders in late January as part of an investigation into suspected illegal funding of Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 and 2022 election campaigns.