Evidence of meeting #34 for Public Accounts in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was contract.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Bloc
Bloc
Jean-Yves Laforest Bloc Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC
I would have a last question for Mr. Marshall.
In the reply you sent to the committee, in the fourth paragraph on page 3, you say that you took other measures to make the rules of the game more equitable. You said precisely this:
In terms of price, we went further, as a result of feedback from suppliers and recognized that a new supplier would suffer extra costs [...] The financial evaluations were equalized as between the incumbent and other bidders to level the playing field.
In saying that, are you not admitting, in a way, that there was a problem involving the financial evaluation and that you attempted in different ways—you say so yourself—to correct a situation which may have been unfair? If that is not an admission—and to my mind, it is one—that there was a situation you already felt was problematical, how do we know that the measures you took to correct the problem are really effective in correcting potentially unfair situations? All the more so since, in reply to a question put to you by Mr. Fitzpatrick, earlier, you said that you had drawn lessons from all of this process. When you admit that you have drawn lessons from something, you are admitting by the same token that there was a faulty process and that you did not have full control over a process that would have been completely transparent and equitable.
Deputy Minister, Public Works and Government Services Canada
Mr. Chairman, I want to make sure that the member who asked this question understands that these are not steps we took after the event. These are the processes that govern the entire request for proposals and the bidding. In other words, when we say we tried to level the playing field, we did that ahead of time. We only learned about the confusion around the number two year later. So there was no attempt to bolt on any additional things later. What I was trying to point out to the committee was that without knowing there was an error, if you look at the fact that we reduced the effective price—
Bloc
Deputy Minister, Public Works and Government Services Canada
I'm sorry, no, but the understanding of the problem, is that what you're...?
Bloc
Jean-Yves Laforest Bloc Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC
You say that this is not an admission of guilt. However, you knew in advance—I am not making this up, you intervened in advance—that there were problems, since you tried to correct things.
Deputy Minister, Public Works and Government Services Canada
I must say I find this to be completely unsupportable, that we knew there was a problem and tried somehow to create some false processes. That is completely a misunderstanding, I am sorry to say.
January 29th, 2007 / 5:25 p.m.
Liberal
Liberal
Marcel Proulx Liberal Hull—Aylmer, QC
On a point of order, Mr. Chair, I want to be sure that Mr. Badun finally received the right translation of Mr. Laforest's question, in which Mr. Laforest was making sure that Mr. Badun would supply the committee with the list of the MPs and the employees who Mrs. Buckler would have approached.
I understand there was a problem in translation at that exact time, so I want to make sure that Mr. Badun has the translation he was looking for.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
I was going to bring that up too.
Mr. Badun, I want to raise the point that hopefully we will be moving to write a report on this issue. I'm not entirely clear whether this is going to be relevant to our report, but I would like you to get the information to us within the week, if it's possible.
Please send it to the clerk of the committee. He will make sure it gets out in both official languages to all the committee members.
Mr. Sweet, you have eight minutes, please.
Conservative
David Sweet Conservative Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
As a point of follow-up, Rear Admiral Pile, at the first hearing we discussed 36,250 account files that hadn't received sufficient verification regarding expenses, either before or after. I wanted to check if prior to coming here today you might have made a call and found out if those verifications are now in process.
RAdm Tyrone Pile
Actually, Mr. Chair, I anticipated this question. I brought a summary of the management control framework that is currently under way within the Canadian Forces. I can provide a copy of the management framework to the committee.
Conservative
Conservative
David Sweet Conservative Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON
Great.
Mr. Marshall, I think one of the reasons why you see some of the members around the table continuing to have a problem with the model, which Mr. Danagher talked about, and the subsequent re-tendering is because this final contract was re-tendered in the light of some very serious allegations.
I'm reading from a memo that you wrote to the minister on August 26, 2003, which says:
...that an acting manager from our department who was responsible for the relocation program and involved in developing the evaluation criteria is in an apparent conflict of interest due to having accepted hospitality from Royal LePage. Other evaluation team members, including an employee who reported to this manager and employees of other government departments, accepted hospitality from Royal LePage that contravened the government hospitality policy.
So in the spirit of what my colleagues said—that not only do things have to be done justly, but they have to appear just—we are moving into a new contract tendering process with this kind of information that is very much out of date. It could have easily been updated by having the pilot project in the original contract already under way and by Royal LePage being very clear on the fact that the property management estimates in the contract were nowhere near accurate. Yet no one asked the incumbent company that was looking after this what their data were.
Could you please explain that?
Deputy Minister, Public Works and Government Services Canada
I think Mr. Danagher can help. Go ahead.
Executive Director, Labour Relations and Compensation Operations, Treasury Board Secretariat
As I mentioned before, we did have knowledge, obviously, of the number of employees who did strike and did exercise the personalized fund. So we did have some idea of a higher estimate than the actual number of people that Royal LePage was reporting to us.
By 2002--and I think this is the contract you're asking the question about--or maybe it was 2004, but in either case, it was decided, because the population of the pilot wasn't sufficiently large and the program--