Bill 14–The Traffic and Transportation Modernization Act - and the "MackTruck" loophole which facilitates the provincial government using single source contracts

Thursday May 31, I spoke in the Manitoba Legislature on Bill 14 which makes changes to Legislation covering traffic and transportation. One result of these changes is that there is a loophole created which makes it very easy for the government to use non-tendered single source contracts. My comments (from Hansard) are below:

Hon. Jon Gerrard (River Heights): There are parts of this bill which deal with transferring opportunities to the municipalities that we agree with. We also agree that there's areas where you can reduce duplication.

But when we saw that there was a Conservative government elected here, we thought that the practice of single-source contracts was ended. But what happened was that the minister then had single-source contracts–two of them–and next thing we know we have a bill, and hidden in the fine print in the bill is what Chris Lorenc describes as a loophole big enough to put a Mack truck through.

Obviously, we can't trust this government to tender contracts. Now we're really concerned that this is going to be a ramp-up of single-source contracts with this Mack truck loophole.

So we're going to oppose this bill, Madam Speaker.

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