A story of pipelines, consultants and conflicts of interest

The federal government—as well as the government-owned crown corporation Trans Mountain—has paid tens of millions of dollars in two separate contracts to McKinsey and Company, one of the world’s premier consulting firms.

One of the contracts was given to offer advice on clean technology, despite McKinsey also working with some of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies.

The other, worth far more, was to find efficiencies in the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project—a project already billions of dollars over budget and well behind schedule. 

Mike D’Souza is the Director of Enterprise and Investigations at The Narwhal.

“Those same oil companies that McKinsey represents, some of them are also in a dispute with Trans Mountain over tolls,” said D’Souza. “Even if these toll hikes are pushed through, it still leaves a bit of a gap for taxpayers, and taxpayers kind of footing the bill for all these significant costs.”

What did the government get for its money? Did it know about the conflicts of interest before signing the deal? Why throw millions at a project already well behind? How much do we know about how the government spends money on these contracts?

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