Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you very much for coming today.
I think the big issue we find on our committee is that people come to us with all kinds of red flags. We have to draw on our witnesses, and often our concerns are put to rest, and sometimes they're not.
Our first round of witnesses said that in the bundling process that's under way there will be a couple of big winners and potentially many losers. Two of the big winners that were mentioned were CGI and IBM, which happen to be on the TPG contract. Those are two of the very big players that were mentioned as possible winners out of this deal.
Madame Saint Pierre and I have talked in the past about this contract. It's become a bit of a symbol of the problems that small and medium-sized players are having in getting contracts.
When you and Mr. Fortier were here, I was asking about the basic rules to ensure fairness. One of the issues we talked about was the fairness monitor. I asked a number of very clear and straightforward questions: is there an obligation to bring in a fairness monitor; is there a financial requirement for the fairness monitor; is this something that's discretionary? In each case the minister answered very, very clearly that a fairness monitor could be applied, but not necessarily, that there was no financial point at which it automatically kicked in.
You sat beside him. I would assume that the minister knows his stuff and that he's being backed up by his staff. Yet the further we looked into it, that doesn't seem to be the case.
We asked Mr. Shahid Minto, who was the former risk officer, about fairness monitors. He said that the fairness monitor is “a Good Housekeeping seal of approval...and it works”, and that “on all large projects there has to be a really, really strong reason not to use one”.
From our understanding, the fairness monitor kicks in at $250 million, so are we being given the wrong information here?