Face of Nation : The city’s technical evaluation team — comprised of city engineers, consultants and subject experts — gave the struggling Montreal-based company a collective score of 63.6 per cent in early October 2018. But days later, the committee overseeing the procurement project asked the team to re-evaluate the technical bids. The second time around, SNC-Lavalin scored 67.3 per cent.
In fact, according to CBC sources, all three bidders for the contract to extend the north-south LRT line saw their scores rise a few points on the second round of evaluation. But both times, only SNC-Lavalin scored under the minimum threshold of 70 per cent. City manager Steve Kanellakos confirmed the details of the two rounds of scoring in an interview on Tuesday.
He said the process allowed the bid evaluation steering committee to ask that the bids be reviewed a second time, and that the process was overseen by a fairness commissioner. The committee included Chris Swail, the former director of light rail planning, and representatives from Norton Rose Fulbright, the law firm hired by the city to oversee the procurement process for the LRT Stage 2 project.
Kanellakos told the discretionary provision given to the city in the RFP was based on “best practices” in these sorts of procurements for precisely the position that Ottawa found itself in with SNC-Lavalin.
“You’ve got a situation where you have a proponent that is three points off on a $1.6-billion contract on a portion of the valuation where there is some subjectivity in terms of the scoring,” said Kanellakos. “There’s always going to be grey areas. Things aren’t always black and white.”
Kanellakos said the city received a legal opinion from Norton Rose Fulbright advising that if it didn’t allow SNC-Lavalin to continue on in the process after missing the technical bar by just a few points — whether three or six — the city could open itself up to legal action from the company, which could have challenged the scoring if it ended up losing the bid.
Kanellakos said SNC-Lavalin’s proposal was “technically compliant,” meaning the bid addressed — in some way, at least — all of the city’s requirements for the project. In the second round of evaluations, SNC-Lavalin scored 67.27 overall, but also scored in the mid-60s in two of the four specific criteria: design submission and maintenance. The scoring breakdown by criteria for the first round has not yet been released.
