Mr. Speaker, the third party contracts the hon. member refers to would fall within the definition of agreement under the bill. In effect the bill cancels or precludes any legal recourse whatsoever for all contracts whether they are with the consortium or other third parties who might have participated. I just wanted to make that point.
One further point is that the request for proposals dated March 1992 made it abundantly clear to all those who wanted to bid on this contract that the government was under no obligation to accept any of the bids. In fact the government reserved the right to reject any or all of the proposals and to elect not to proceed with the project.
All the companies involved in the bidding process, and perhaps this foreign company was one of them, knew in advance that any moneys they spent in preparing the proposal could very well have been money lost because the government made it clear in its bid for proposals it could elect not to proceed with the project.