The transparency of a procurement process helps deter-mine whether the public sees the results as legitimate and is particularly critical for major public infrastructure projects. In this section, we provide a few observations on the transparency of P3 and conventional procurement processes.
Transparency has several dimensions. Here we focus on two: first, the availability of information to the public regarding the procurement process and outcomes-information that is sufficient to allow any third party to form an independent view of the process but which excludes commercially confidential data; and, second, the transparency of the process for all the bidders at every stage of the process.
P3 procurements typically include a fairness advisor who provides an opinion on the fairness and transparency of the process for all participants. However, we understand that this is not the norm for conventional infrastructure projects of equivalent scale in any of the four Canadian jurisdictions most active in the P3 market.
We have also found that there is little or no publicly avail-able information on major conventional public infrastructure procurements, including information on any cost overruns (e.g., causes, amounts, recipients of any additional payments made by governments) unless the procurement in question has been reviewed by an auditor general or a commission of inquiry. We understand that some of this information would be available through access-to-information channels.14 However, this type of availability does not come close to the standards of transparency employed in a P3 procurement process, where the RFQ, RFP, and a redacted form of the partner-ship agreement is always posted on the relevant public agency websites. In most cases, the VfM report is also made available to the public.
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The second wave of P3s has been subject to greater scrutiny than that applied to similar conventional projects. |
Therefore, we conclude that the procurement processes for the second wave of P3 projects have been consider-ably more transparent than the procurement processes for conventional public infrastructure projects. This has meant that this second wave of P3s has been subject to greater scrutiny than typically applies to conventional infrastructure projects of equivalent scale.
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14 Access-to-information legislation differs by province. For example, in British Columbia, the legislation is called the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.