Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for being with us this afternoon.
I want to point out, for everyone's benefit, including my own, that our study pertains to how competition can make infrastructure dollars go further, in other words, how the federal government can get more bang for its infrastructure buck.
My first question is for Mr. Oakey.
In your presentation, you talked about cases in which contracts were awarded as part of closed tendering processes. You said the practice resulted in increased costs and lower quality work. I can appreciate wanting to benefit from a bidding process that is open to everyone. I am not sure whether there was a direct relationship between the two events, but you cited cases where the cost of infrastructure work had risen considerably, if not astronomically, such as in Montreal.
Are we really establishing a link between the tendering process and the financial goal of projects? Have we not ruled out the possibility that misappropriation might have something to do with the topic we're discussing this afternoon, that being competition?