Face of Nation : The official confirmation that SNC-Lavalin won the $1.6-billion contract to extend the north-south LRT despite failing to reach the minimum technical bar will no doubt raise many questions in coming days. But key among them is whether council, the elected officials charged with approving the giant deal, were lied to.
Here’s what we do know. SNC-Lavalin’s proposal to extend the Trillium Line didn’t score 70 per cent in the technical evaluation, which was supposed to be the minimum threshold a bidder had to meet. Late last week, the city clerk’s office provided the final scores for all the bidders for the Stage 2 project.
Those scores officially confirmed that among the six finalists — three bidding for the Confederation Line extension contract, and another three bidding for the Trillium Line — SNC-Lavalin alone failed to reach 70 per cent in the technical scoring. SNC-Lavalin, operating under the name TransitNEXT, earned a total technical score of 67.27 per cent, while its direct competitors scored in the mid-80s.
We also know that SNC-Lavalin was, by far, the cheapest bidder. This information is not new. Back in March, Mayor Jim Watson said the Montreal company’s bid was “the best deal for taxpayers.”
However, the official scoresheet gives an indication of just how much difference there was in price between the bidders. SNC-Lavalin’s score for its financial submission was a whopping 97 per cent, while the second-ranked bidder scored a mere 42 per cent.
But cheapest doesn’t always mean best value, especially now that we know SNC-Lavalin didn’t hit the technical threshold. After all, the technical submission explained how the company would build the rail system. So if the city’s own technical evaluators found those details sub-par, how will that affect the final product?
Those are questions likely to be asked in coming days. We know now that it was the executive steering committee — made up of the city’s five most senior bureaucrats — that exercised this discretion given to it under RFP Subsection 6.5.2(4). But here’s the problem: Council had never seen the RFP. Indeed, until it was released Friday, the document had remained secret. More to the point, never in the discussions about how the bids were evaluated did this discretionary power come up.
