Premier plays “dodge-the-question” with Hunter Tootoo

Premier Paul Okalik is still refusing to say why cabinet rejected the advice of civil servants and ignored the lowest bidder when awarding a contract this past June for construction of the Rankin Inlet health centre.

“I am not trying to be evasive,” Okalik said in response to a barrage of questions from Iqaluit Centre MLA Hunter Tootoo in the legislative assembly Oct. 22.

Those questions continued this week, along with Okalik’s attempts to dodge them.

“The government needs to make sure that when it chooses to pay more that it has to for projects, they had better have a good solid ground on which to support their decisions. In this case, Mr. Speaker, it looks like the ground is pretty shaky,” Tootoo said in a member’s statement.

As reported in the June 13 issue of Nunatsiaq News, the Nunavut cabinet – at a special meeting held before the start of the Baker Lake legislative assembly session – awarded the Rankin health centre contract to a joint-venture comprising Clark Builders of Edmonton and the smaller Sanajiit Construction firm of Rankin Inlet.

Public tender documents show the Clark-Sanajiit partnership submitted a bid of $13.439 million for the job, about $540,000 higher than a bid of $12.908 million submitted by Ninety North Construction and Development.

At the June cabinet meeting, ministers threw out a recommendation from Public Works officials to accept the lowest bidder, and decided to negotiate a contract with Clark-Sanajiit instead.

At the time, no cabinet ministers and no deputy ministers were made available to answer questions about the decision. Instead, the GN directed all inquiries to Nino Wischnewski, their director of communications.

“Public Works did recommend the lowest bidder, and cabinet decided that the civil service makes the recommendation and the cabinet decides. In this case, they decided that they didn’t wish to go with the lowest bidder and they went with another company,” Wischnewski said in an interview in June.

After that, Public Works officials were directed to negotiate a $200,000 reduction in the Clark-Sanajiit price, and to increase the level of Inuit employment on the site from 25 per cent to 32 per cent.

But they made no such request of the lowest bidder, Ninety North. “We were never asked…. We were never given any opportunity at all,” said Alan Vaughan, Ninety North’s executive vice-president.

When Tootoo asked why the government didn’t try to negotiate a lower price with Ninety North, Okalik sidestepped the question, saying instead that the GN wants to support local business when it can.

“What we would like to signal to the people of Nunavut is that we support you if you are locally based. We will do our part in trying to make sure that you get your share of the contracts and that is the message that we deliver,” Okalik said in the House.

The GN’s tender call for the Rankin health centre job said “For the purposes of this tender call, the provisions of the Nunavummi Nangminiqaqtunik Ikajuuti policy apply.”

But when cabinet made its decision, the Clark-Sanajiit joint-venture was not listed as a Nunavut firm under the NNI.

One of the partners in the winning bid, Clark Builders, is a large construction firm with offices in Edmonton and several southern cities. Sanajiit Construction is owned by the Evaz Group Ltd. of Grimsby, Ont., but maintains an office in Rankin Inlet.

Alan Vaughan of Ninety North said in June that Public Works officials told him Ninety North had the best bid even after the NNI policy was applied.

“It is our understanding, although we don’t have the documents, and we have been orally advised, that after the bid-adjustment process under the NNI, we had a superior bid under the NNI. We still had the best bid,” Vaughan said in an interview.

He said that’s likely because of Inuit employment commitments made in Ninety North’s bid, which would have been applied according to an arithmetical formula set out in the NNI policy.

At some point in June, the name of Sanajiit Construction – the smaller firm in the winning joint-venture – was added to a registry of “Inuit firms.” It’s not clear whether that was done before or after the contract award.

But Okalik evaded a question about it from Tootoo last Wednesday, saying instead that the government is not obliged to accept the lowest bidder.

“That advertisement also specified that the lowest bidder might not necessarily get the contract. So everybody knew that even though they may have the lowest bid, the government, at the end of the day, will decide as to the cost-benefit analysis,” Okalik said in the House.

As for Ninety North, Vaughan said that – for now – it is not seeking legal action against the government.

“At this time our effort has been on attempting to convince the government to sit down and have a serious chat with us about it,” Vaughan said in an interview this week. “So far they have refused.”