Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister of Public Works, Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When a department puts out a tender that Public Works and Services is going through their procurement for, we use a budget as the limitation. The budget will govern how high we’re able to go with the tender. Thank you.

Thanks to the Minister for that. It’s hard for me to believe in this case that the budget allowed a differential of $60,000.

In the Minister’s Statement earlier he started off his statement by saying, we want to make sure that local businesses can benefit from government contracting opportunities, and that’s a lot of the point that I’m trying to make today.

I’d like to ask the Minister, what does he ensure, or what does Public Works and Services, would procurement shared services do to ensure that northern businesses get government contracting opportunities? How does procurement maximize the process for northern vendors? Thank you.

Thank you. The procurement shared services follows the Business Incentive Policy. The Business Incentive Policy is

there to give an advantage to the northern suppliers, northern providers of service. So we use that to make up the difference usually in a product that comes from the South versus something that we’re procuring in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.

BIP doesn’t always apply and I have discovered that BIP doesn’t apply if you are considered non-compliant or unresponsive, which I guess if you’re out you’re out, but in this case one of the difficulties was that the tender was made difficult to understand. The tender document was looking for equivalencies to a particular product, but it doesn’t define the term “equivalencies” and it’s left to the bidder to try and figure out what that is. In a lot of cases they will state equivalencies are acceptable, but ultimately want a very specific product, and as I said in my statement, why do we not just say so? We want product X and never mind the equivalencies because if they’re trying to match it to something that already exists, an equivalency won’t do.

So in a case like this, what adjustments will the department make to assist bidders in better understanding our tenders and what we’re looking for in a bid? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In this case it was a matter of furniture and, as the Minister says, form, fit and function. They all fit, but they were off enough because it was not the exact same product, a product not available in the North, it was deemed unresponsive.

Lastly I’d like to ask the Minister, with centralized procurement shared services, it’s a new product, it’s a new service that we are putting out. I presume we expect to see improvements.

Will there be any kind of an evaluation or any kind of an analysis of whether or not there are improvements and when will we see that? Thank you.

Thank you. When the government determines to put together a shared service, whether it be a financial shared service or any other shared services that we offer, we do that based on efficiency and effectiveness of the product or item for the task that we’re trying to perform. So it would be essential, I believe, for us to review procurement shared services. We could perhaps run it for two years and then do an evaluation to see if it did function and did meet its

intent to improve efficiency and effectiveness of procurement services. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.