Quebec auditor-general Renaud Lachance has asked some hard questions about strange practices in the transport department, and so far the answers from Premier Jean Charest and his ministers have not been good enough. The pressure for a full-scale inquiry, already substantial, has just been turned up.
In a report Wednesday, the spending watchdog cited some oddities, to use the politest possible term, in Transport Québec contracting. The most obvious problem was a 2004 case involving two snow-removal contracts.
The department detected bid-rigging, and put the work out for new tenders, saving taxpayers some $150,000. That's fine, but nobody at the transport department reported the evidence of crime to the police.
An internal report about the affair seems to have been locked away in a deputy minister's desk and hidden from the ministers who should have seen it.
If that's true, it's outrageous. (If the ministers did know, that's worse.) Michel Boivin, the current top civil servant in the department, said that in 2004 there was no accepted process to report collusion. We've got news for him: the process consisted then, as now, of picking up the phone and calling 1-800-659-4264, the number for the Sûreté du Québec. How is it that the senior civil servants of the day failed to comprehend that?
In another malodorous case, the auditor said the ministry ignored "sound management practices" in giving a $500,000 paving contract to a firm 20-per-cent owned by David Whissell, then a Liberal cabinet minister.
More broadly, Lachance found a growing number of "risk situations" in contracts that were poorly managed. And in one group of 32 contracts, 17 had attracted only one bid - and nobody at Transport Québec asked other contractors why they hadn't bothered to tender.
Lachance will continue to investigate, and that's good because the transport department spends a lot of money: $2.9 billion in 2008-09. Lachance's alarming conclusions were based on a limited sample: 191 contracts totalling $209 million. There's a lot more to examine.
All this should make it even harder for Charest to resist demands for a robust inquiry into the way public-works contracting is handled in Quebec. After this year's long and spectacular series of revelations about suspect practices in Montreal and other municipalities, we now have from an unimpeachable source a distinct signal that all is not well at the province-wide level, either.
For Charest to continue to stonewall against an inquiry is beginning to look downright perverse. It's time to find out the full extent of the rot, and to clean it all out.