Based on the model the department was proposing to use over a three-year standing offer and cutting the number of suppliers down to potentially as low as seven, initially there would have been significant reduction in pricing because there would have been the psychology of fear in the bidding process. But in the way things work, over that three-year term you would have seen the loss of all these other supply companies that could no longer tender to the federal government. The Conference Board of Canada's pre-consultation documentation indicated what a significant part of the economy the federal government is in terms of the temporary help industry, and without access to that client, most of these companies would go out of business.
The long-term effect would be that those seven companies would then have retaliatory pricing because they had been forced down in this competition of fear, this bidding in fear. Three years later, the retaliatory pricing would come in and you would see a significant increase in prices.