I'm Indigenous in northern Ontario and whenever First Nation governments are accused of stuff like this, we are demonized as incapable corrupt governments that are in hands of private interests, wealthy individuals and generally wasting money for no value because we don't know what we are doing.

When the federal government does this .... the country gets to debate it as just another function of government.

Yeah, I'm familiar with some aspects of consulting, and consulting in government and some large organizations is kind of crazy. It's really appealing that for a "competitive price" government workers can be even lazier than they would be doing the work themselves, because they leave the "thinking" part to consultants.

Problem is that competency has left the public service, because pay is more lucrative from these contracts, except for manager types. But it's to such an extent that the government cannot make decisions that they are supposed to be making, and so the contractors really only can do stuff that seems pleasing to the contracting manager, so you end up with solutions like "digitize", "make things go faster", "AI", which are dumb and obvious to knowledgeable people and journalists, but specific and proper solutions can't be vetted at a technical level by the people in charge though they needed to be. Or the managers get caught up on useless parts of it and miss out on the better parts. Or they are so indecisive and influenced by one or more contractors, that ultimately, the laziest crowdpleaser solutions are adopted.

With consolidation of firms the problems are multifold. Look at what happened with MNP and the BC clean energy program: the same consulting firm can play all sides so they always come out on top, as the judge, jury, lawyers and executioner of a money-distributing process.

This problem is pervasive and not limited to governments/public services, though there are numerous instances. If you think Conservatives are going to fix this you are misguided, it will only funnel more money to contractors and the people of Canada get less for it.

Huh, sounds like the typical filling of pockets that politicians do with their friends.