Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Monday morning I was contacted by a constituent who was very concerned about a recent Department of Health public tender. Their business received a fax Friday afternoon from Inuvik Health to which they only noticed Monday morning and, by the way, Mr. Speaker, it closes this Thursday. To understand this situation and appreciate the complexity, I will describe it this way.
The tender was faxed to this office Friday, May 14th. The fax was examined on Monday morning, May 17th, and the tender closes on May 20th. Simply put, this business is only allowed four business days to reasonably respond to a complex tender. So is it reasonable, or is it fishy, Mr. Speaker? I’ll let the public decide on how this process will roll out.
However, if the problems stop there I’m sure we can simply chalk this up as an oops or an oversight. But when you read the tender document, a chill of unfairness starts to roll down your spine. When you read the details of the 13 pages of request on the tender document you will see that they use one name of a local competitor against another here. The Department of Health uses the spreadsheet of a local business, which can only cause you to wonder who actually wrote this tender, but if it only stopped there, the story would probably end. But, Mr. Speaker, the Department of Health then uses specific product numbers from this one local business in their public tender, which really can only be attained from this private business. So how is that fair competition?
As opposed to using industry standards and product names that everyone knows and understands, like Johnson and Johnson and Phillips as an example, they decide to use product numbers, descriptions and product names you can only guess came from one company. Mr. Speaker, if you get into the product description now, the wording is very vague and ambiguous, which causes you to be forced to guess on what the Department of Health reads.
So if you’re a northern business and you want to compete on this public tender, you actually have to call your local competition to ask them for pricing so you can compete. Is that fair? I would definitely say not. Mr. Speaker, again, it causes me to wonder what’s going on.
Mr. Speaker, this process is kind of a strange stage of many things that arise and surface as to what is really going on. Mr. Speaker, I think the Minister of Health and Social Services is forced with only one option which, I brought to her attention, is to cancel the tender, issue it fairly and make sure northern competitors aren’t competing each other in such an unfair, blatantly biased manner, which I think brings disrespect to this government and it can be corrected today. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The honourable Member for Kam Lake, Mr. Ramsay.
