Normally when you file a Freedom of Information and Protection and Privacy (FOIPOP) request, it takes months and eventually information just arrives in the mail unannounced.

So you can imagine my surprise when yesterday Feb 29^th just after 5pm, as the government was in defense mode over its decision to give an untendered contract to a Public Relations company with close connections to the government, Lilani Kumaranayake a policy director with the Department of Economic Development called to tell me that not only did they “reactivate” my FOIPOP from Nov 29^th, 2011 (I was told at the time ERDT didn’t have any docs) but she asked if I wanted to have them couriered that night or get them the next day. 

(Note: I was orginally notified that documents would FOIPOP was being re-activated on Jan 31st, but told I would get docs no later than Feb 25th).

I agreed to wait around for them to courier the documents over to the office. So I ran over to the day care to pick up my two year old, tell me wife I’d be home late and when I got back to the office just as they’d promised the documents arrived just before 6pm.

So what was contained in the documents?

I’ve attached the package to the end of this blog, so please read it and form your own opinions.

There’s nothing new in these documents that changes what our group released on Monday…you can see that post HERE.

But we did want to make sure that documents were in the public to be viewed.

“Dam The Torpedoes” & NS Premier’s Office

One thing worth pointing is on page 33 (Part 3 of attachments) in an email from Sandra McKenzie to Lisa Bugden (VP NSBI) and Tracey Taweel (Associate Deputy Minister Comms NS) indicating that as soon as Treasury Board approved the documents that she would inform “Shawn (Fuller, Premier’s Comms Director), Matt (Hebb, Premier’s Principal Assistant) and Paul (Black, Policy Director).

At the end of the email she says “Dam the Torpedoes”, well if there’s one sentence that sums up govt attitude to contracting though out this mess…its probably this one.

Reaction to Stephen Lunn President of NSBI

Yesterday Stephen Lunn said that he was “comfortable” with the untendered contract. He says that they had to use alternative procurement rules that allow them to forgo regular tendering process.

You can find articles with NSBI HERE & HERE

However there are two problems with this explanation:

First, there is no mention of alternative procurement in any of the emails between EDRT, NSBI and Premier’s Office or in the documentation submitted to the Treasury Board.

In fact the first mention of alternative procurement is only made on Jan 30^th, 2012 about one month ago, and after they knew that procurement documents would be made public.  

So did they really all the time believe they were using alternative procurement back in April, May 2011? And if they did, why is there nothing in the documents stating as such.

Second, NSBI and the NS government knew months, even years in advance about this ship building contract. So why did they wait until the last minute to launch a campaign?

Even MT&L Public Relations on Tuesday admitted they had little direction when they were first hired, and spent most of their time “scoping”. You can see more detail HERE. Bills and documentation released by NSBI doesn’t account for what the $240,000 of professional fees was based on. There is still no information on hours billed, amount of money paid to MT&L per hour of work etc. You can find NSBI info on invoices HERE

The information has been broken up into four seprate files. 

Part 1