Procurement controversies series -- Quebec

Lax rules let Quebec politicians funnel contracts to pals, Chabonneau commission told

A retired senior Quebec bureaucrat kicked off the Charbonneau Commission hearings Friday by recounting a history of secretive, lax and often corrupt procurement practices that allowed politicians to funnel contracts to party loyalists and rubber-stamp huge cost overruns that essentially plundered the public purse.

Lafrance took the stand at 9:30 a.m. and over the course of the day walked the commissioners through more than 50 years of history that reflected a constant struggle to reign in corrupt practices.

He said that it wasn’t until the Quiet Revolution in the early 1960s that the government began the process of cleansing the system; a process that continues to this day.

What became apparent from Lafrance’s historical recounting was that despite the many changes to the contracting laws, the same problems of corruption, collusion and favouritism still exist in 2012.

Lafrance said that during the Maurice Duplessis era, the so-called Department of Colonization controlled all procurement, secretly distributing contracts to loyalists of Duplessis’s Union Nationale.

He noted that a government study of the contracting system in 1960 concluded that the system was “immoral, scandalous, humiliating and disquieting for the public” because it essentially allowed cabinet to hand out contracts to the supporters of the governing party.

In the 1960s, systems were put into place to create lists of “qualified” contractors with various expertise and to improve transparency. But even then, Lafrance said that officials often had no idea whether contractors on the lists even existed or were in fact qualified to do the job.

One major problem, he said, was a lack of control over cost overruns.

He said they were the result of bad project management on the work site, but the government simply paid out the additional funds without verifying the demanded amounts.

Responding to mounting public complaints, the province began a gradual process of modifying its contracting regulations to meet national and international standards of transparency and competition.

This included publishing all tenders on an international publicly-accessible computer network that manages the bidding process.

Lafrance concluded his testimony by saying that no matter what legislation is adopted or policies put into place, stamping out corruption depends on “the ethics” of the people involved.

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