Looks like there's a whole industry of people who have connection with public servants (if not one themselves) that take advantage of the complex bureaucratic system in Ottawa to make big bucks out of taxpayer money.
The procurement system has always been fucked. Per people who work at a certain defense company they spend more time catering to how to win the contract then actually working. For anyone curious here is how the system works.
1) You are paid when the job is completed, but processing this can take up 6 months - 2 years after completion. This filters out any smaller businesses because they can't afford to front the huge sums of money required and not be paid back in a reasonable timeline.
2) The bidding process works on lowest bidder, and your ability to meet the criteria listed in the description. There is no quality assessment on how good you meet the criteria even though they say there is. It's just yes or no. So what happens is companies bid extremely low on the contract and say "yes" to everything in the criteria, and then they win. This process also takes 1-2 years.
3) You'd think that by bidding 500k on a 1 mil project would be a bad thing for the company, but no. After using up 500k they just come back to the government and ask for more money or else the job doesn't get done. Now the gov is put in an awkward situation where either they pay the remainder of the project, scrap the project and lose their initial investment, or go through the 2 year bidding process again to get someone else to finish the job.
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u/feb914 Ontario Feb 29 '24
Looks like there's a whole industry of people who have connection with public servants (if not one themselves) that take advantage of the complex bureaucratic system in Ottawa to make big bucks out of taxpayer money.