Thank you, Mr. Warkentin.
Good afternoon, Mr. Beaulieu.
SNC-Lavalin manages 319 buildings in the Ottawa and Montreal regions and in other places. These are large buildings. There are more buildings than that throughout Canada because they are of all different kinds. Here we are referring to large buildings in the federal capital region. One hundred and thirty-eight thousand of Canada's 522,000 government employees are in this region. These office buildings allow federal government workers to do their job.
Mr. Beaulieu, I would like you to know that on September 2, 2009, I wrote a letter to Minister Paradis, who was responsible at the time for Public Works and Government Services Canada. I wrote the same letter again on March 15 when Ms. Ambrose became the minister responsible for PWGSC, and I wrote again to Ms. Ambrose on this topic on April 13.
I am the member for this region. Therefore, the problem that you have raised here is frequently mentioned by small- and medium-sized enterprises and by larger firms. It's not transparent. There is something strange going on for building specialists. In the Outaouais region on the Quebec side, we are even more heavily penalized if we compare Gatineau to Ottawa. Only 1.4% of contracts are awarded to Gatineau businesses, whereas 98.6% of these contracts are awarded on the Ottawa side, which is absolutely shameful. And yet, there is much more expertise on the Quebec side, and you are a representative of this.
I hope this gives people an idea of what is going on. I presume that the people from PWGSC and from SNC-Lavalin are listening. I especially hope that the people from PWGSC are listening because we're talking about elected officials. The minister is responsible for PWGSC, not for SNC-Lavalin.
If I understand correctly, this is about awarding contracts. Now, contracts are awarded upon invitation by SNC-Lavalin. Certain businesses, specialists or engineers are invited to bid. These are no longer public calls for tender. So we're going from a public system paid for by the taxpayers to a non transparent system where SNC Lavalin issues invitations to companies it selects, as if it were the owner of all these buildings, the federal government's building inventory.
We are currently following up on a lead. We heard things in March concerning certain invoices. Apparently, it cost $5,000 to replace six lightbulbs under the contracts awarded by SNC-Lavalin to certain people. And we don't know how they were awarded, Mr. Chair.
There was a $36,000 invoice for office cleaning. This was to clean the offices of federal ministers. Two thousand dollars was paid for green plants—I don't know what was so special about them—and up to $1,000 was paid to install doorbells. It's absolutely appalling. It's unacceptable.
What do you understand from this system? On the one hand, there is a public method of awarding contracts, and on the other hand, there are invitations issued to bid on contracts.