#quebec government

[news-buzz]

Supreme Court docket to listen to Quebec’s problem to daycare entry for asylum seekers Information Buzz

Descrease article font measurement Enhance article font measurement The Supreme Court docket of Canada says it can hear a problem from the Quebec authorities to a decrease court docket ruling granting asylum seekers entry to backed daycare areas. In a choice launched at the moment, the Supreme Court docket says it can hear Quebec’s enchantment of a February 2024 choice from the province’s…

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Le principal obstacle à l'expédition de bois de chauffage à Québec," Montreal-Matin. April 21, 1943. Page 6. --- Québec, 20. (B.U.P.) - M. Thomas Côté, producteur de bois, a déclaré que si les routes étaient ouvertes, il serait en mesure de fournir de quinze à vingt mille cordes de bois de chauffage à Québec au fur et à mesure. Il a dit que M. Charles Cantin pourrait faire davantage. Il semble donc que le manque de routes carrossables actuellement soit le principal obstacle à l'approvisionnement de bois de chauffage.

M. Côté dit qu'il faudrait aussi une certaine aide de la commission des prix et du commerce en temps de guerre, car le prix que coûte le bois au producteur ne permet pas de faire des dépenses additionnelles.

Si nous sommes bien informés, la Commission des prix est disposée à aider matériellement dans une certaine proportion.

[nando161mando]

▶️Pro-Palestine activists camped near Quebec's pension office, demanding divestment from Israel-aiding firms and closure of the new 'Israel' office.

#FreePalestine #Canada

[bmpmp3]

also sorry to my 3 or so francophone followers that i now use ur language purely as some type of echolalic vocal stim. for some reason beaucoup de and avec have replaced lots of and with in my entirely english mental narration. i mumble bonjour merci beaucoup bonjour bonjour to myself and then get confused when someone nearby responds ça va. almost like i forgot french was real?

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Federal cabinet minister Pablo Rodriguez is seriously considering a bid for the leadership of the Quebec Liberal Party, Radio-Canada has learned. The minister of transport is being approached by Liberal supporters in Quebec and Ottawa, sources say. Sources indicate that Rodriguez is interested in those overtures and is reflecting deeply on the idea. A source close to the negotiations said Rodriguez could be "ready to move on" after two decades in federal politics. Rodriguez has begun consultations to gauge interest in a possible candidacy. Radio-Canada has learned that he has spoken about the possible bid to his cabinet colleague, François-Philippe Champagne, whose name has also been circulating at varying intensity for several months.

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Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Canada's privatised shadow civil service

PJ O’Rourke once quipped that “The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.” But conservative parties have unlikely allies in the project to discredit public service: neoliberal “centrist” parties, like Canada’s Liberal Party.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/31/mckinsey-and-canada/#comment-dit-beltway-bandits-en-canadien

The Liberals have become embroiled in a series of scandals over the explosion of lucrative, secretive private contracts awarded to high-flying consultancy firms who charge hundreds of times more than public sector employees to do laughably bad work.

Front and centre in the scandal, is, of course, McKinsey, consligieri to opioid barons, murdering Saudi princes, and other unsavoury types. McKinsey was brought in to “consult” on strategy for the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), a Crown corporation that gives loans to Canadian businesses.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/business-development-bank-canada-hudon-mckinsey-1.6720914

While there, McKinsey performed as per usual, veering from the farcical to the grotesquely wasteful. Most visible was the decision to spend $320,000 on a livecast fireside chat between BDC president Isabelle Hudon and a former Muchmusic VJ that was transmitted to all BDC employees, which featured Hudon and the host discussing a shopping trip they’d taken together in Paris.

Meanwhile, BDC has been hemorrhaging top people, which leaving the organisation with many holes in its leadership — the kind of thing that would pose an impediment to its lofty goals of substantially increasing the support it gives to businesses run by women, First Nations people and people of color.

Hudon — a Trudeau appointee — vowed to “start from scratch” when she took over the organisation, but then went ahead and did what her predecessors had done: hired outside consultants who billed outrageous sums to repurpose anodyne slide-decks full of useless, generic advice, or unrealistic advice that no one could turn into actual policy. They also sucked up BDC employees’ time with endless interviews.

The BDC has (reluctantly) disclosed $4.9m in contracts to McKinsey. The CBC also learned that Hudon parachuted several cronies from her previous job at Sun Life into top roles in the organisation, and that BDC had reneged on promised promotions for many long-term staffers. Hudon also repeatedly flew a chauffeur across the country from Montreal to BC to drive her around.

In Quebec, premier François Legault hired an army of McKinsey consultants at $35,000 per day to advise him on covid strategy, for a total bill of $8.6m. McKinsey’s contract with the province stipulated that they wouldn’t have to disclose their other clients, even in the event that they had conflicts of interest:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/caq-legault-mckinsey-pandemic-consulting-1.6602374

The contract was kept secret, as was the long-running, $38m contract between McKinsey and the Hydro Quebec power authority:

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1927738/mckinsey-hydro-quebec-consultants-barrages-affaires

Most of the bad press McKinsey gets revolves around the evil advice it gives — like when it advised opioid companies to pay cash bonuses to pharma distributors for every death-by-overdose in their territory (no, I’m not making this up):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/30/mckinsey-mafia/#everybody-must-get-stoned

But these rare moments of competence should be understood in the broader context in which McKinsey isn’t evil, they are merely utterly, totally fucking useless. The 2022 French Senate report on McKinsey really digs into this:

http://www.senat.fr/commission/enquete/2021_influence_des_cabinets_de_conseil_prives.html

They find that a quarter of the work McKinsey turned in was “unacceptable or barely acceptable in quality.” This is in line with the overall tenor of work performed by consultants. For example, when it came to giant Capgemini, the French Senate found that the work it provided was “of near-zero added value, indeed sometimes counterproductive.”

And yet, despite the expense and “near-zero added value,” hiring outside consultants is a reflex for neoliberal centrist leaders. Trudeau has presided over a massive expansion of the Canadian government’s reliance on outside consultants:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-liberals-spend-billions-more-on-outsourced-contracts-since-taking/

After campaigning on a promise to reduce outside consultancy, the Trudeau administration increased consultant spending by 40%, to $11.8 billion. This shadow civil service is not just more expensive and less competent that the real civil service — it is also far more opaque, able to fend off open records requests with vague gestures towards “trade secrecy.”

Since 2015, McKinsey has raked in $101.4m in federal contracts, even as the civil service has been starved of pay. Meanwhile, federal departments insist that they need to “protect Canada’s economic interests” by not disclosing outside contracts, and list their total spend at $0.00.

https://nationalpost.com/news/outsourcing-contracts-mckinsey-billions

The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada estimates that between 2011–21, the Canadian government squandered $18b on outside IT contracting that could have been performed by public servants. In 2022, the Government of Canada spent $2.3b on outsource IT contracts, while the wage bill for its own IT staff came in at $1.85b.

It’s not like these outside IT contractors are good at their jobs, either. The most notorious example is the ArriveCAN covid-tracking app for travellers, the contract for which was awarded to GCstrategies, a two-person shop in Ottawa, who promptly turned around and outsourced it to KPMG and other contractors, whom they billed to the government at $1,000–1,500/day, raking off 15–30% in commissions.

For months, the origins of the ArriveCAN app were a mystery, with the government insisting that the details of the contractors involved were “confidential.” But ArriveCAN was such a steaming pile of shit, and so many travellers (a population more likely to be well-off and politically connected than the median Canadian) had to deal with it, that eventually the truth came out.

The ArriveCAN scandal is ongoing — just last year, it cost the Canadian public $54m:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-arrivecan-subcontractors-multinationals/

Trudeau’s Liberals didn’t invent outsourcing high-stakes IT projects to incompetent grifters. Under Conservative PM Stephen Harper, Canada paid IBM to build Phoenix, an utterly defective payroll system for federal employees that stole millions from civil servants, bringing government to a virtual standstill. Thus far, the Government of Canada — which paid IBM $309m to develop Phoenix, as a “cost savings measure” — has paid $506m in damages to make good on Phoenix’s errors:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ottawa-paid-out-400-million-in-phoenix-pay-compensation-to-federal/

The Liberals didn’t invent Phoenix — but they did deploy it, after campaigning on the wastefulness and incompetence of the Tories’ outsourcing bonanza. And after Phoenix crashed and burned, the Liberals increased outsourcing spending.

All of this is well-crystallized in last week’s Canadaland discussion between Jesse Brown and Nora Loreto:

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/853-the-indulgent-consultant/

And on his Substack, Paul Wells proposes that the Senate — a largely ornamental institution in Canadian politics — is the unlikely check of last resort on the Liberals’ fetish for outsourcing:

There are former deputy ministers at the federal and provincial levels, secretaries to cabinet, a former Clerk of the Privy Council, a former chief of staff to a prime minister. A lot of them can remember the days when big decisions weren’t farmed out to firms that make their founders rich and are spared the rigours of accountability for their counsel. Surely some of them would like to shine a light?

https://paulwells.substack.com/p/shine-a-brighter-light-on-contract?

Image: Sam (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Canadian_House_of_Commons.jpg

Presidencia de la República Mexicana (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Justin_Trudeau_June_2016.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: The legislative chamber of Canada's House of Commons; behind the speaker's chair, the back wall has been replaced by an enormous $100 bill. The portrait on the $100 bill has been replaced with an unflattering, braying picture of Justin Trudeau. The Bank of Canada legend across the top of the note has been replaced by the McKinsey and Company wordmark.]

[gayarograce]

You wake up one morning and the headline in the papers reads "world made of pudding all along". How do you advise the government to proceed?

[vorgoth]

i've been thinking a lot abt going back to using my birth name but changing how it's spelled since that's what i don't love abt it...............

[pickled-flowers]

Finished a comic yesterday but I'm too lazy to translate it......... heck

[soulless-bex]

the french language on countries/languages: if it’s a noun it’s capitalized, if it’s an adjective it’s not, but there’s also these seven exceptions you need to be mindful of

the english language on countries/languages: IF ITS A COUNTRY THERES A CAPITAL

[rebellum]

Saw a thing that mentioned how religion should be "benign and privately practised" and the "privately" part makes me go 😬😬😬 like no I think as long as they aren't forcing it on others people can practice their religion in public!

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Un vaste projet,” La Presse. March 10, 1933. Page 23. ---- (Du correspondant de la PRESSE) Québec, 10.- Le ministère de l'agriculture va être appelé à aider à la réalisation d'un grand projet intéressant la région de Chicoutimi. Une résolution venant du conseil du comté de Chicoutimi vient d'être passée demandant au gouvernement d'égouter les savanes de Bagotville et du rang S.-Thomas.

L'inspection de la savane a été faite et on croit que 250 cultivateurs pourront y être placés, Le coût approximatif des travaux serait de $85,000. On croit que la tourbe pourrait être utilisée comme combustible, ou encore comme engrais. L'endroit serait excellent pour la culture du lin. On pourrait y établir une industrie du lin avec profit.

[bloodyarson]

visit my new tag #ellis's adventures in late capitalism customer service and predatory business practices for highly entertaining accounts of my experiences dealing with any kind of company's or government's wonderful treatment of their obviously very strongly valued customers and their very astronomically high quality offered services

[icicle-nail-biting]

here's a little gem created by our good buddy pal infie

Vox: today we shall warn y'all about the BIRDS Ed: that's right, those feathery thingies. They're fast and superpissapants and you probably didn't want to know about them but they've been accidentally coming onto your computer lately and leaving poop under your speakers so you probably do want to know what they are. First of all, they have feathers and they're kind of big so they look like birds but they don't fly. They're sort of like a cross between a cockroach and a cricket. Stupid robots. Wanda: thats right, they build an entire city out of poop in a process called "breadpudding" and they don't even have mouths. Ed: they have mouths! Wanda: THEY HAVE BONE-Y EARS AND BONE-Y FISH TEETH. Ed: they're trying to buy territory so they can carry on with their bread-making business but we aren't all totally on board with that. No offense, Spongebob. Wanda: Sorry, i'm talking about dead BIRDS. Its been going on for years now but it's really only just got started happening more- Cyanide: But did you know that your kitchen floor could be killing you, specifically if the insides of those BIRDS, who have started taking up residence in your house, have died and you left them on there for weeks? Ed: they're like cockroaches that have legs but they poop so much more than cockroaches. Cyanide: WHAT? Ed: Y'all know what this is called? Cyanide: I DON'T THINK SO Ed: COUGH *RABID VOICE* *INSTRUMENTAL YELLING* THE BIRDS! THE BIRDS THAT WE ARE ALL TRYING TO AVOID HAVE INFILTRATED OUR MINDS Vox: WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE

[immaculatasknight]

The colonial mind

[marx-soul]

Fucking living the dream rn, turns out my hourly salary at the job i got hired at is 4 dollars higher than the salary listed on the job listing, fuck yeah!!!