Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I was once the mayor of a municipality, and at that time we instituted a buy local policy. Here we have a situation with two competing companies, one Chinese and one from Quebec. For a difference of about $60,000 between the two bids, the contract was awarded to the lowest bidder.
Given the parties involved and the importance of this contract, it is crucial that we be able to question all the ministers on the list to learn more about the process that made it possible to award a contract to a Chinese company rather than to a Quebec company, even though the price difference was negligible and there were very significant consequences for our security.
I urge all committee members to consider that if the Quebec company met the requirements to provide these services to the RCMP, that means we have the technology in Canada to do this kind of work. We certainly have to ask questions of the ministers. Why haven't we already implemented solutions in Canada to encourage Canadian procurement to promote our technologies throughout our national security sector? I think that's a very legitimate question.
There are a lot of names on the list, but, if we are professional in the way we go about this, I think we can quickly go through all of these people to get answers to our questions.