I thought Mr. Drouin.... He's not even here to hear that, so I won't tease him much about it.
The final question was, “(d) what is the total number of government employees whose job involved, in whole or in part, monitoring parliamentary committees?” This was quite an odd answer: “The Privy Council Office has 0.5 full time equivalents whose time is dedicated to monitoring parliamentary committees.” I find it very odd that it's just 0.5 out of the Privy Council.
One of the big issues on this thing, besides the fact that they're giving a sole-source contract to what everyone knows is a Liberal-friendly mouthpiece.... Frankly, if roles were reversed and we had given, say, $355,000 to, heaven forbid, the Rebel or the National Post, I'm sure there would be an equal outcry about that. If the $355,000 had gone to Canadian Press, maybe, but the Toronto Star...not exactly.
I think it's important that we have the procurement ombudsman come and join us again. If anyone has read his annual reports—I'm a geek, so I like to—he really has a lot of great stuff in there. He presents a lot of concerns. He's been at our committee a couple of times to discuss things. One of the issues is sole-sourcing. Correct me, anyone, if I'm wrong, but I believe it's about $50,000 that we're not...that governments should not be sole-sourcing contracts without a specific reason. Now, there are legitimate reasons when it's something like Microsoft. The product's not available for anyone else, or there's only one company available to do business, etc. But again, I have to question, of all the news media outlets out there....
One person we've all met is Kathryn May. She worked for the Ottawa Citizen covering government business and the Phoenix issue. Then she took a buyout and joined iPolitics. Kathryn May was one of the victims of the Toronto Star purchase and was laid off. I have to wonder why we would sole-source the Toronto Star to do this work when there are private media people out there who could very easily have done that, who could very easily have bid on it. We all saw Kathryn May here time after time, covering the whistle-blowers, Phoenix and other issues. She peripherally comes to mind, especially because she used to work for iPolitics.
I think we need to have him here to look at the sole-sourcing. A couple of years ago we did an OPQ on sole-sourcing, asking how many sole-source contracts had been awarded above the $50,000 measure over a one-year period. This goes back to the Phoenix debacle with IBM's involvement, and also partly I think with our small business review. It may have been in our small business review that it came up that small computer companies, IT companies, were not getting a chance to bid. IBM was getting sole-source stuff because IBM was considered safe. I think the comment we heard was that no one ever got fired in the public service for hiring IBM. That certainly was the case with Phoenix hiring IBM and then messing it up. I don't think anyone got the boot for that.
We put in the OPQ and it actually came back. I think it was 28 pages of about 50 listings per page of sole-source contracts given by the government. One of the interesting ones we found repeatedly was the same total of $89,086, repeatedly, for building maintenance, but for different companies and different cities—Quebec City, Ottawa, Gatineau, again and again and again; different companies. One of the companies that actually got the money was SNC-Lavalin for building maintenance. You know, I laugh about the government's claim of the 9,000 jobs at risk with SNC-Lavalin, which of course has proved to be a lie. One of the things SNC-Lavalin does, and it's actually linked to this committee, is work for Canada Post. For anyone who has the community mailboxes in their neighbourhood, guess who does the snow removal for Canada Post around the community mailboxes? Anyone? Come on. I'm leading up to it. It's SNC-Lavalin.
The reality is that if SNC got banned from bidding on government business, such as with Canada Post, someone else would get the job. Bee-Clean or someone else would still get the job. It's the same with the building maintenance. Again, I have to wonder why there were so many $89,086 sole-source contracts.
In a previous life, when I was in the hotel business, one of the tricks we would play—one of the tricks management working for us would play—is that if they had a dollar limit for which they could sole-source something without getting competing bids, usually we'd get three. If it was $2,000, they would find the same company to do three bids at $1,950. I'd sign off on the PO, or they could sign their own PO for up to $5,000, so they'd sign multiple ones at $4,500. If we're ever trying to catch someone who is knee-deep in kickbacks and stuff like that, that's one of the places to look. We should probably be looking at that for our friends with SNC.
That's one of the things that come up. When we have put in requests, we've never had an answer to what is it about building management that so many different companies—SNC and different companies—all get sole-sourced exactly the same total? It's not that this work could be done only by SNC, for example. You can't just give them a sole-source contract that way. It's not that these companies were the only ones available or with intellectual property attached to building maintenance, if there are all different companies. Again, why is there so much sole sourcing?
In software we saw multiple sole-source contracts for the same software but from different companies, again listed as their being the only people available. If you're buying Microsoft, I understand, but you can't sole-source a $50,000 or $80,000 contract from Best Buy and then do the same from Office Depot and say, well, Microsoft is the only software available. Why are they sole-sourcing the same software repeatedly? Actually, it was PeopleSoft. It's funny that it was PeopleSoft software—which, of course, is linked to Phoenix—but repeatedly, it was the same software. Maybe SNC-Lavalin should be hired to fix Phoenix. The same software was purchased repeatedly, sole-sourced to different companies for the same type of software.
If we have to buy PeopleSoft, because that's the existing software and we have to upgrade it, why is it through different companies that this is happening? We saw multiple things, again, sole-sourced contracts for photography. Again, in Ottawa alone, there have to be, if you look through the Yellow Pages—if such a thing exists anymore—or on Google, multiple companies doing photography.
I have to wonder. There was a scandal recently—I think it was Paris for COP or whatever the most recent environmental junket was. Maybe it was Czechoslovakia. The Minister of the Environment spent tens and tens of thousands of dollars for a private photographer to follower her around and snap pictures of her. Surely there have to be a lot of people in Ottawa who do that. Again, why are we sole-sourcing photography? We actually sole-sourced bands to play at events. I have to wonder, again, why we are sole-sourcing bands.
When we started the greening of government, we had people in from different departments, and the subject of buying new cars came up. The government said, “Well, we're only going to buy hybrid cars, electric cars”, but none of those were purchased for the RCMP for the G7. When I asked why they were choosing those cars, they said that those ones were available. Again, it goes back...and then we need to have further investigation and procurement. We've seen that the bureaucrats are not even following their own orders. We asked if the rule was to buy a hybrid car like a Prius. They said that they couldn't find one for an SUV. But there are hybrid SUVs. They bought a bunch of Nissan Rogues. Surely if you can fit four people into into a Rogue, you can fit four people into a Prius or a hybrid Hyundai Tucson or a hybrid Camry. I'm wondering, again, if we are going out sole-sourcing from these companies, maybe we should be buying Chevy Volts to keep GM in Canada.