Government Operations committee  Well, I think the fundamental process is probably good. I think what I've seen here is probably different from anything else I've ever experienced, in that senior people probably have the power to get around a number of things if they want to. We can see this in terms of access

Government Operations committee  Yes, for sure. I forget the exact circumstances, but we had an outstanding CITT complaint. CITT does what's called a stop contract award, in which they notify the department that the contract can't be awarded until the CITT ruling takes place. This is a questionable process in my

Government Operations committee  Well, in terms of the urgent specification, the rationalization that was used was that the year-end was coming up. Everyone understands the year-end process—of course, that's March 31 in the government. Their argument was, well, things are busier during the year-end, and we don't

Government Operations committee  If you're talking about the Public Sector Integrity Canada office, we did send them a lot of information. At the time, they were just being set up, so this would have been March 2007. It had existed before as the Public Service Integrity Canada office and then changed to become t

Government Operations committee  It's a slow process.

Government Operations committee  I agree with you; it doesn't seem fair. I will say I don't believe IBM got everything they asked for, but they got some of the documents, the same documents that we had asked for earlier and were not given.

Government Operations committee  I would certainly take the position of, in effect, some of the articles in the media when we started this a year ago. Have an independent investigation. It could be done in a few weeks. It isn't really that difficult. Get the documents, get the people involved, and then it would

Government Operations committee  Absolutely. I intend to pursue this. I believe it may have been the view of people in the department that as a relatively small company we wouldn't have the resources to pursue this or we would be too afraid of reprisals, but I certainly intend to proceed as long as it takes.

Government Operations committee  We have a binder here with a lot of the evidence we have. We can leave the whole thing or we can pick out specific documents.

Government Operations committee  Yes, of course, and we certainly are prepared for that.

Government Operations committee  On the first CITT decision, the answer is yes, they decided that CITT had been patently unreasonable. We could have gone back and re-filed that at CITT, but that didn't appear to be a promising avenue. We did try to challenge the urgency. When Public Works declared that this con

Government Operations committee  Yes.

Government Operations committee  Yes, for way too many.

Government Operations committee  Sure.

Government Operations committee  It is a small number of companies that could potentially bid on this, yes.