Minister Denies Being Influenced by McKinsey On Immigration Targets

Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Sean Fraser arrives for question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Oct. 3, 2022. The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser told the House of Commons government operations committee on Feb. 15 that the involvement of consulting firm McKinsey & Company in his department had no influence on how he determined immigration targets for the country.

“I don’t have a relationship with representatives of McKinsey or Dominic Barton, if anybody had been curious,” Fraser said.

“The company had not advised me directly or influenced the decision-making about our immigration levels plan.”

When Barton was head of McKinsey, he chaired the Liberal government’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth which suggested in 2017 to significantly increase immigration levels.

The current immigration targets are similar to what the council had advised. The government plans to reach 500,000 new immigrants in 2025.

Fraser said he wasn’t aware of any involvement McKinsey could have had on the immigration levels plan and that he hasn’t reviewed anything they’ve produced in that regard. Fraser became immigration minister in October 2021.

Deputy Minister of Immigration Christiane Fox told the committee that “we don’t have a report in which they would have contributed to the immigration levels plan for 2022, 2023, 2024.” Prior years were not mentioned.

The government operations committee is reviewing contracts awarded to McKinsey by the Trudeau government, which have grown exponentially since it came to power in 2015.

CBC first reported on the contracts in early January and provided information from sources within Immigration Canada who criticized McKinsey’s involvement with their department.

Immigration Canada has had two contracts with McKinsey in recent years, one for $2.9 million and the other for $24.8 million, Fraser said.

The minister said those were to conduct an external assessment on digital transformation and the other to make operational improvements to move toward digitization.

Fraser was asked by Conservative MP Stephanie Kusie about the information sources provided to CBC to the effect that McKinsey was influencing policy.

“McKinsey was an idea from the government. The policy was decided for civil servants. It causes a lot of operational instability,” one source told CBC.

“For the sake of clarity, I would certainly dispute that McKinsey is making policy decisions on behalf of the government,” Fraser said.

With the contracts being awarded before becoming minister, Fraser also downplayed his responsibility.

“In any event, this is an ordinary exercise where the department was seeking to grow its capacity to offer digital services,” he said.

In early January, McKinsey defended its work with the government.

“Our government work in Canada is entirely non-partisan in nature and focuses on core management topics, such as digitization and operations improvement. Our firm does not make policy recommendations on immigration or any other topic,” the firm said in a statement on Jan. 10.