Thank you, Mr. Chair. We do get requests for negotiated contracts and we look at a few factors when we determine whether we’re going to follow through with the negotiated contracts. One of them, obviously, is the number of contractors that are in the community. If there are other contractors that have an opportunity to bid on the work if it goes public or if they’ve also submitted a request for a negotiated contract, we look at that. We look at past performance. If we’ve negotiated a contract before and the work and the timeliness of it has not been up to par, then that’s another factor we take into consideration.
Negotiated contracts are a way for a lot of the smaller communities especially to build capacity and what we’re finding and what we’re encouraged by is that some of the contractors in the smaller communities now have the capacity and the capability to bid on public tenders. But we continue to review each request as it comes in. Obviously, with the new building season coming up this summer we’re already starting to see some activity on that front and we’ll review them on a case-by-case basis. Thank you.