Mr. Speaker, yesterday's question period brought back fond memories of when the current Minister of Human Resources Development was minister in charge of the CIDA cesspool and I was the critic.
The Prime Minister makes much of the fact that there were three bidders for the infamous Mali contract. He has apparently forgotten that those three companies, all from the same region, were hand-picked by the minister, who then told the House, “I have no recollection of only three Quebec firms having been kept on the short list”. Other competitors including at least one better qualified than Transelec were not even allowed to bid.
The bad odour from that saga forced CIDA to rewrite its rules for tendering.
It was well known that at that time the prime qualification for a large CIDA contract was a substantial donation to the Liberal Party. What was not well known until recently was that doing business with the Prime Minister was much more useful.
Long live pork barrel politics.