Mr. Guimont, if I may, I will come back to the first question I asked the minister. You are the deputy minister. Last April, Mr. Paradis announced that the contract with Royal LePage would not be extended. You knew this two and a half years before that date. The Auditor General of Canada had said that the contract contained countless irregularities. You knew this, so you decided not to extend the contract.
How is it then, when you knew that the contract would not be extended, and when you knew that the documentation for the last request, which had been won by Royal LePage, was enough to fill boxes and boxes, that at this stage, you only gave new bidders six weeks to familiarize themselves with the file, to grasp an understanding of it and to submit a proposal? When you put that into perspective, Royal LePage may have had a year, a year and a half or even two years to familiarize itself with the file.
I understand that some people are extremely smart, but six weeks is an impossibly short time to go through reams and reams of documents. So I ask you the question, Mr. Guimont: What in God's name possessed you to grant new bidders only six weeks?