Well, I do, in fact. You know, the closed bidding process sometimes is used by an owner to facilitate other goals that the entity is going to have: to secure a workforce, to make certain there is training, and to make certain that the work is executed safely.
The piledriver contractor in Winnipeg who was referred to had to bid for the work. Chances are he did not bid the work at three times the rate, because the municipality would not have accepted that particular bid and would have gone on a re-tender. If he bid the work at a reasonable rate and came in with a request to be paid three times for the same work.... Sometimes that is going to be frowned on. It may be that they drove three times the number of piles because it's a floodway drilled in silty soil.
The idea of building something like the floodway to protect the community and having it done right strikes me as a pretty laudable goal for the City of Winnipeg and the Province of Manitoba to have.