When Will The lesson Be Learned?
When will the lesson be learned?
In today’s world, the lowest bid is not always the best bid, rather it is the lowest bid that will make profit for the company bidding. Thus the lowest bid does not produce the best product.
Like the Canada Line with its many problems, SNC Lavalin, which heads the P-3 consortium operating and maintaining the line only care about profit margins and not operating an acceptable product for the public.
Here are the problems for SNC Lavalin and Bombardier Inc for the BS Line.
From what I have been told, the federal portion of money for the BS and Surrey Lines must be included in a P-3 funding format. With a proprietary railway (which Bombardier Inc. is telling everyone that will listen that the ART/Movia proprietary light-metro is not a proprietary light metro), very few companies will bid on the P-3 because Bombardier and SNC Lavalin will have an insider’s edge and if SNC Lavalin is convicted in federal court for bribery, holding the engineering patents for the proprietary light metro may disqualify them from entering into the P-3 process altogether.
Makes one wonder with the BS Line, is the fix already in and all the bidding process, nothing more than an elaborate “charade”, as what Judge Pittfield called the Canada line P-3 bidding process, during the Susan Heyes lawsuit against TransLink?
Has the Trudeau and Horgan governments paved the way for SNC Lavalin and Bombardier Inc. to further increase their profit margins by allowing the two companies to flaunt the bidding rules for the two light metro projects?
SNC-Lavalin failed to meet technical threshold for $1.6B LRT contract: sources
Montreal-based company’s rivals easily met technical score, sources tell CBC
Joanne Chianello · CBC News · Posted: Mar 22, 2019
SNC-Lavalin won the $1.6-billion contract to extend and maintain Ottawa’s north-south LRT line even though it didn’t achieve the minimum technical score to qualify for the project — a threshold its competitors met easily, CBC News has learned.
The Montreal-based company beat out two other consortia to extend the Trillium Line from Greenboro into Riverside South, a decision cemented with a 19-3 vote by Ottawa city council on March 6.
However, sources with direct knowledge of the Stage 2 evaluation process told CBC that SNC-Lavalin failed to achieve the minimum technical score of 70 per cent, a requirement set out in publicly available documents.
CBC is not naming the three sources because they are not authorized to speak with the media.
SNC-Lavalin, currently at the centre of a major political controversy, is also one of the key partners in Rideau Transit Group, the consortium building the thrice-delayed first stage of Ottawa’s LRT system.
The troubled company was one of three pre-qualified bidders for the extension of the Trillium Line. The other two — Trillium Link and Trillium Extension Alliance — scored well above the minimum technical grade of 70 per cent, according to CBC’s sources.
City ‘stands by’ process
City officials and their hired experts overseeing the procurement process have steadfastly refused to confirm whether SNC-Lavalin met the technical threshold.
When council debated and ultimately approved the spending for LRT Stage 2, which includes extending both the east-west Confederation Line and the north-south Trillium Line, Coun. Diane Deans asked if the winning bids had met the minimum 70 per cent score.
She was told the scores were commercially confidential. Deans replied she wasn’t asking for the score, only to be assured the winning bids met the threshold.
Again this week, the city refused to say whether SNC-Lavalin made the minimum grade, citing commercial confidentiality of the process.
Given more than two business days to respond to inquiries, the city refused to provide an in-person interview, sending instead an email attributed to Chris Swail, the director of O-Train planning.
“The city stands by the overall integrity of the procurement process in no uncertain terms,” according to Swail’s statement.
The statement also says city officials “are all satisfied with the results” of the procurement process and in “the winning proponent’s ability and capacity to design, build and maintain the Trillium Line extension.”
SNC-Lavalin has built rail systems all over the world, including the award-winning Canada Line in Vancouver.
“We are very proud of the proposal we submitted and look forward to getting started,” said an SNC-Lavalin spokesperson in an email.
The engineering and construction giant said it has no knowledge of the breakdown of the score as the process is confidential.
How the bids were evaluated
The procurement process was overseen by law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, consultants Deloitte, fairness commissioner Oliver Grant, city-hired engineering experts and the city’s own staff.
According to the statement from Swail, the three technical proposals were reviewed by a team of experts for “completeness” and “conformance” to make sure the submissions met the requirements of the contract.
In order to receive a passing score, a technical score threshold of 70 per cent for each of the criteria was required.
– City of Ottawa report
But these “completeness” and “conformance” reviews are not the same as the technical scoring, and in fact were conducted before the bids were scored for their technical merit.
The technical evaluation for the shortlisted bids occurred in two stages, according to public city documents.
Individual expert evaluators reviewed and scored the submitted bids for the Trillium Line on a number of criteria including project design, engineering and operations.
“In order to receive a passing score, a technical score threshold of 70 per cent for each of the criteria was required,” states a city report.
The evaluators then came together to decide on a so-called “consensus” score out of a maximum of 500 points.
It is common in procurement processes that a bid that doesn’t make the technical grade be disqualified and barred from the financial evaluation round. This week, the city would not say whether this was the case with the LRT Stage 2 procurement.
