Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My name is Jean-Pierre Chupin. I am a university architect and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Architecture, Competitions and Mediations of Excellence at the Université de Montréal. I would like to point out that I am speaking as an individual based on my expertise in competition jury practices in built environment fields.
I have been documenting competitions in Canada for more than 20 years. I established the Canadian Competitions Catalogue, an online resource documenting nearly 500 competitions and more than 6,000 architectural, landscape and urban design competitions organized since Confederation. This bilingual library, which is consulted by more than 3,000 users from around the world every month, is supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
I have helped establish an international research network on competitions and have published reference works in the field. I have also sat on the advisory committees for museums and governments. As an adviser to Public Services and Procurement Canada and the Parliamentary Precinct, in Ottawa, I would like to remind you today that many civic and government buildings have been subject to major competitions, starting with the Canadian Parliament in 1858. In addition to that were competitions for the legislative buildings in Ontario in 1880, British Columbia in 1892, Saskatchewan in 1907 and Manitoba in 1913, not to mention the competition for the Canadian national Vimy memorial in 1921, which was one of the symbolically most important in the history of Canada.
The government sought my expertise in the international competition for the block 2 redevelopment of Parliament Hill, which was adjudicated in 2022. The building will house your offices for the next decade. That was the best organized competition I have ever observed, with outstanding representation of Canadians in a large composite jury.
As an academic who assists in training future generations of professionals, I am extremely concerned about breaches of democratic practices that characterized the way the judgment that was reached in the competition for the monument to Canada's mission in Afghanistan was invalidated. All the studies show that, in judging the complexity of highly symbolic and civically important projects, such as public buildings and monuments, a popular vote will never be as reliable, fair or transparent a procedure as a well-organized competition procedure. A competition jury is analogous to a court jury. It represents the diverse range of public interests and works in a rigorous manner.
The jury in the national monument competition was property constituted with representative members of all interests and informed of the many issues at stake. It debated all the proposals at length and reached a consensual judgment on behalf of the collective interest. I did not observe the jury, and, in fact, very few people, not to say no one, had access to the jury's report, which moreover is highly problematical. However, the fact that the government announced to the top team that they had in fact won the competition means that the jury functioned properly.
Now if it became a normative public procurement practice to invalidate competitions or requests for qualitative proposals and to replace them with online voting, no professional would agree to allow his or her proposals to be subjected to anonymous clicks made based on a few images published on a website. You can actually draw an analogy here. What would you say if a criminal court judgment were replaced by an online vote to determine the guilty party? You'd say that was tantamount to a revolting public lynching and the denial of democratic institutions and mechanisms.
I believe I can attest to the concerns of the public procurement representatives with whom I regularly work and who are awaiting your decision to know whether design jury practices will be permanently compromised in future federal and provincial public contracts. The government has a duty to conduct itself in an exemplary manner in all its proceedings and to honour its commitments.
I also believe I can testify on behalf of future professionals and students to whom my colleagues and I speak every day and who constitute a generation of young Canadians who are highly sensitive to ethical and social justice issues. How will we explain to them that, to ensure fairness, a government can establish judging procedures that are representative of all interests and then decide to flout those rules?
In conclusion, in the situation before us, we have reached a turning point in the history of competitions in Canada. Please allow me to appeal to your judgment as parliamentarians: it is important that the jury report be distributed as widely as possible and absolutely essential that the result of this competition be determined in the name of democracy and ethics.
Thank you,
