Why should it cost taxpayers 50% more to transport a unionized worker to a Crown construction job than it costs to transport a government employee to their job And why should we be paying these travel expenses if there is local labour available

The answers to these and other questions may be found within the mysterious pages of the Crown Construction Tendering Agreement (CCTA), one of the more discriminatory and expensive bits of policy to ever be inflicted by the government on an unknowing public. The CCTA is a sweetheart deal that was cooked up in 1995 between the government, some unionized contractors, and the Building Trade Unions. It governs how Crown corporations contract construction jobs.

The objective of any fair contracting process, and certainly any process that involves taxpayer-owned enterprises, should be to get the best job done at the lowest possible cost. In other words, a public tendering process to discover the lowest qualified bidder. But the CCTA corrupts this process by shutting out bidders and workers based on political criteria.

First of all, non-union workers and builders are pretty much out of luck. Non-union contractors who want to win a Crown contract have to hire 75% of the workers from union hiring halls in Regina and Saskatoon. In other words, they have to toss aside their own people and hire from the approved union list. Workers and builders in small towns and rural areas are also out of luck, even for local projects, because first dibs go to regulars at the big-city union halls.

This is where the travel expenses come in, because there are a lot of urban workers who are subsidized for travel to the job site. Just last December, the CCTA was quietly amended to increase the transportation allowance for these workers from 38 cents to 42 cents per kilometer along with an increase in the daily subsistence pay from $62 to $75 a day. This is a high allowance by any standard, and plenty higher than the 31 cents allowed for government employees. It is also more than three times the travel allowance for war veterans, who are allowed only 12 cents per kilometer to travel from the countryside to the hospitals in our towns and cities.

On top of all this, employers have to pay 21.5 cents per worker, per hour worked, into a union-controlled "development fund" whose purpose is elusive.

There are several big losers because of this scheme, including workers and businesses who are unable to meet the CCTA's discriminatory requirements, and suffer lost income and opportunities as a result. This includes building trades outside of the two big cities. The people of Saskatchewan also suffer from higher taxes and utility bills, and less spending on important programs, because the cost of Crown projects is artificially inflated.

The CCTA should go the way of the dodo bird- And fast. It is under fire from the newly formed Saskatchewan Business and Taxpayers Alliance whose members includes the Saskatchewan and Saskatoon Chambers of Commerce, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the North Saskatoon Business Assoc., and the Saskatchewan Construction Assoc.

Alliance members are demanding an open and public review. But since the CCTA was a deal struck without public input, the government says that the groups who cooked it up in the first place are the only ones who can review it. Taxpayers are not welcome.