A Liberal minister was on the defensive Wednesday after being asked about his role in inviting to the Yukon a representative of a firm that has apparently done work used in part by the Saudi Arabian government.

That’s Dominic Barton. He presented Tuesday as a speaker at the Opportunities North conference – which is a partnership between the Yukon Chamber of Commerce and similar organizations in the Northwest Territories and Edmonton.

The territorial government was listed as one of the sponsors of that event, with some webpages listing Barton as the global managing partner emeritus of McKinsey & Company.

According to a February 2018 release though, Kevin Sneader was announced as the new global managing partner of the company.

The Star was unable to verify Barton’s most up-to-date professional affiliation with the firm in time for today’s publication. The release, however, did note that he was with the firm for at least nine years.

Those in attendance at the Whitehorse conference included Ranj Pillai, the territory’s deputy premier, who also holds the role of Economic Development minister.

He was accompanied by Premier Sandy Silver to round out the list of just under 50 listed speakers for the two-day conference.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday afternoon, Pillai defended the call to invite Barton to the event.

He confirmed it was him who had reached out to Barton and his assistant for the invitation, as he had been meaning to host him in the territory for quite some time.

“Would I invite Mr. Barton again if that’s the reaction after hearing about one story?” Pillai said. “At this point in time, I certainly would.”

In the legislature, Yukon Party interim leader Stacey Hassard pressed Pillai about his knowledge of Barton’s link to McKinsey & Company, a firm being linked to the Saudi government. Pillai said later he had not seen the New York Times piece before local news reports began focusing on it.

Pillai had first met Barton in 2012 at an event at Halifax.

Meanwhile, that Times piece showed that McKinsey had authored a report examining reaction to the Saudi government’s austerity actions, some of which were announced in 2015.

A copy of that report was obtained by the Times, which media reports from last weekend suggested had been used by the Saudis to target some of its critics.

The firm named a number of people who were contributing to negative social media attention, particularly on Twitter, about the government.

The Times reported that after McKinsey’s report was issued, of those named, one was Canadian, who had his phone hacked and two brothers imprisoned, while the other faced arrest and the third had his account shut.

Meanwhile, Barton’s known connection so far to McKinsey is as follows: he is listed as the firm’s senior partner and global managing partner, after stints in Korea and later as the group’s chairman in Asia.

His bio page shows that he is a UBC grad and Oxford University alumni. He is also listed as the chair of a Canadian government council, serving on Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s advisory council on economic growth.

As Pillai noted, he is also the chancellor of Ontario’s University of Waterloo, and serves on Canadian mining company Teck Resources. He has given a number of talks at various universities.

“We certainly don’t condone what’s happening abroad,” Pillai said in response to Hassard on Wednesday.

“We have actually thought about bringing him up for a number of occasions; this just worked for his schedule,” the minister later added.

The invitation to Barton was being overshadowed by a geopolitical conversation about the government’s association to the firm, something Pillai called “a really big stretch.”

He continued to say that it was “quite sad” and “unprofessional.

“Have I done something wrong?” he asked the opposition in the assembly. He later assured the house that there was no money spent by the government to bring and host Barton.

“I am sure there are more and better questions about the economy that we could be talking about,” Pillai said.

The firm itself has since released a statement, which it posted to its Twitter page last weekend.

“We were never commissioned by any authority in Saudi Arabia to prepare a report of any kind or in any form to identify critics,” it said in part.

“In our work with governments, McKinsey has not and never would engage in any work that seeks to target individuals based on their views.”

The report it created, the statement added, was an overview of information that was already publicly available by looking at social media usage. It was not prepared for any government group, and intended to be shared amongst primarily an internal audience.

“We are horrified by the possibility, however remote, that it could have been misused in any way.

“At this point, we have seen no evidence to suggest that it was misused, but we are urgently investigating how and with whom the document was shared.”

The territorial minister remained steadfast in defending the decision.

“I still think that we did the right thing in making sure we had a phenomenal speaker.”

Being asked about it in the legislature by opposition MLAs, who said the topic seemed to be a sensitive one for the minister, Pillai said that the sensitivity instead lay in a suggestion that he was somehow connected to the state of affairs in Saudi Arabia.

He also worried that it detracted from conversations about the content of the Opportunities North conference itself.

“I’m a little disheartened that we haven’t talked about the fact that we had a great conference so far on disruption.”

(The Star has provided coverage Tuesday, today on the opposite page – featuring an address by Pillai – and plans more for Friday’s edition.)

Also as reported in Monday’s Star, Barton was an expert who spoke last Friday at a meeting of the federal, territorial and provincial ministers responsible for the Status of Women – again in Whitehorse. Speakers at that meeting focused on improving women’s participation in the economy, among other things.