Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses and departmental officials for attending today's committee meeting.
I think we can all appreciate the need for the government to move quickly at the onset of COVID-19. At the same time, we recognize that we also have a responsibility to be good stewards of taxpayers' dollars and to do our due diligence.
I'm thinking specifically of contracts that were awarded to businesses during that time. I'm thinking of a situation in which a company that apparently hadn't even been in existence for a week was awarded a contract for $237 million, and then subsequently sublet that contract to Baylis Medical, the firm of a former Liberal MP.
What criteria did the department use in making decisions such as awarding contracts such as that?