On Tuesday, it was transportation minister John Hickey who was caught in an advanced stage of pinocchiosis over federal funding for the Trans-Labrador Highway. He supposedly told someone he had a signed contract. As we have all learned this would not be even close to true since the feds are waiting on the province to get a work plan in place.
Today, it was natural resources minister Kathy Dunderdale. The blunder-plagued minister was trying to explain why the Bull Arm Corporation cancelled a tender and then re-tendered.
The Liberal opposition claimed the first tender was cancelled when a local Liberal came in with the lowest bid. They argued the project was redefined so that someone else - in this case the future local Tory candidate's campaign manager could get a piece. The future candidate, by the by, is Joan Cleary; Bond Papers discussed her appointment to head the Bull Arm Corporation some time ago.
But in defending the tender, Dunderdale actually provides us with a pretty convincing example of a complete cock-up. Whether it was politically motivated - as the Opposition suggests - or just a case of mismanagement and incompetence, the whole tender should never have been handled the way it was. Around here, Bond Papers would contend it is evidence that - as we noted last November - Joan Cleary isn't qualified for the job she currently holds.
Here's why.
The original tender at Bull Arm was for the complete replacement of the existing security shack. That is a pretty straightforward project involving labour and materials together as one unit. One can logically conclude that if the first tender was for complete replacement, Bull Arm management had made a determination that the building needed complete replacement. It's an important piece of work, even if the shack is relatively small.
While Bull Arm management may have had a cost estimate in mind, they ran a tender process and a low tender duly arrived. Notice that Dunderdale does not say how much Bull Arm originally expected to see as the bids; she does claim, though, that the prices were such that Bull Arm decided to cancel the entire tender and , presumably, do nothing in the meantime.
And that's where it gets hinky. If the existing security shack was in such a state that it needed to be replaced, there simply isn't any reason to cancel the tender and not do anything about it. This approach suggests the original tender was bogus.
According to Dunderdale, Bull Arm only went to a second tender once some harsh weather caused damage to the shack. Nice try as excuses go, but if the original tender had been let or if the project had been re-tendered right away, Bull Arm Corp would likely have avoided the situation caused by weather. There would be no emergency since proper action was taken from the outset.
Instead Bull Arm Corp now had an emergency on its hands, albeit one that evidently resulted from its own poor management practices.
Rather than go to tender - as normally required under the Public Tender Act - now called the situation an emergency. For some completely unfathomable reason, Bull Arm split the project into two tenders: one for materials and one for labour and then went to three specific bidders for quotes.
Under the Public Tender Act, that is permissible - in a genuine emergency. But the legislation's exemption for emergencies is intended to cover real emergencies, not ones caused by dubious management decisions.
Interestingly enough, the original low bidder didn't get the work and the whole project was completed for over $50,000 less than the original tender's lowest bidder. We don't know if the whole shack was replaced, as originally intended, or if the thing was patched up and repaired. We'll never know since the people involved in the process would never make public all the documents and records to justify the situation.
Instead, we should be suspicious of the facts as described by the minister. On the face of it, the minister describes incompetent management of a relatively small project. On top of that the minister provides excuses for the mismanagement by claiming the proper process was followed. Clearly it wasn't: the cancellation of the original tender suggests something was amiss.
And if that weren't bad enough, we see once again the most familiar of all excuses trotted out by the Williams administration when it is accused of something: the rules allow it.
As Offal News put it last month, in another story related to Bull Arm Corp:
That does not mean it's right, correct, proper or ethical; he merely means it's legal. Legal is a long way from appropriate.In the case of the security shack, it doesn't matter if Joan Cleary was involved in the decision or not, or whether the inning bidder was her former campaign manager or even that the low bidder on the cancelled tender call was a Liberal.
What Dunderdale has described is a classic example of shoddy management that led to damage to government property, followed by a clever - but all-too obvious - abuse of the Public Tender Act to divert attention away from poor management. They failed to exercise due diligence, to use a phrase the former InTRD minister herself was fond of abusing.
To make it worse, Dunderdale, as minister responsible for Bull Arm, is effectively endorsing the blunders made by Bull Arm Corp as well as condoning the abuse of the spirit of the public tender statute.
We were all told to expect better from our government three years ago, indeed to expect better from this government.
The case of the Bull Arm shack shows just how little changed in local politics in October 2003.