Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to speak today about government contracting once again and make reference to a letter I received from the Premier on March 16th, in which he stated that the FMBS had assembled a committee of senior management from several departments. This committee was tasked to develop a government-wide directive on negotiated contracts. That task force was to come forward with a report by March 31. In the House I asked the Premier if he would expand the task force, or the committee's mandate, to include requests for proposals and to make the report available to stakeholders for input. Mr. Speaker, I would like to make some reference to a number of areas here. Invitations to tender were used by the government for many decades and other governments as well. In recent years we have made more use of requests for proposals. In 1997-98, the report that I have, indicates that RFPs totalled $20 million and in 1998-99, through half the year, the total was $55 million.
Invitations to tender, Mr. Speaker, is an easy system. It is awarded on price only and it is opened in public and everybody knows the rules. But that is not so with RFPs. One of the difficulties that may be perceived in this is when small to medium companies bid and they bid unsuccessfully on RFPs after a while they become discouraged, because they do not have the resources to go after this like the larger companies. They may drop out from submitting RFPs. The feedback to proposers is also an issue, Mr. Speaker, the companies receive no feedback and the whole RFP process is based on a criteria sheet, called a rating schedule and it has six criteria, but the cost of the RFP, when awarding it is only 25 percent of the amount. Proposers are not given access to the rating sheets. Price by successful proposals are not revealed. This begs the question, are we turning contractors off because of our system and how do we know we are getting value for our dollars? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
--Applause