Mr. Chair, may I please underline once again that the process was not as good as it should have been. I acknowledge that. I would like members of the committee to understand that the result would not have changed as a result of this number. We saw that one of your members had done his own calculation. We've done the same calculation.There was no fraud or bad faith involved. You consider that as well.
When you consider that the result would not have changed, you would also consider, as Mrs. Fraser has rightly pointed out, that there might have been other bidders who would have participated if they'd seen a different number, for example. I want the committee members to understand how far we went to try to invite as many people as possible. Here's how far we went. The quality of the service was very important to the members of the armed forces. We wanted people qualified to handle a very large volume--12,000 moves--for the armed forces. If we had asked for people with experience of 12,000 or more, there would have been only a single firm in all of Canada that could have qualified, and that is Royal LePage. We said we would consider the bid of anyone who had done at least 500 moves. We also said you didn't have to have an army of people to handle this on day one. You could go into a consortium, or you could tell us what you would do in the future, and we would assess you on that basis.
So, members of the committee, you have to understand that we took a lot of steps to try to make sure that as many people as possible would participate. There was no malintention. There was no bad faith involved. And even after you consider all of that, the result would not have changed. And that's the basis, really, of what I'm submitting to you. It's really not appropriate to start tearing up contracts that have been entered into in good faith, especially when there will be an opportunity in 2009 to have another process. Believe me, we have learned a lot of lessons from this. I mean, we are going to be much more careful, and that's how government works. You learn from your mistakes. You have to understand that if there were fraud or bad faith, then the money would not be a factor. We would need to restore the faith of the process and re-tender, but there was no such thing here.