SECRECY/CONFIDENTIALITY:407 Sale Mysteries in Ont.

All information that the government chooses to provide to the bidders is being held in a secure government office called a Data Room — the kind of secrecy you might expect if they were getting bids for a new stealth fighter plane.

Deborah Reid, spokesman at the Office of the Minister for Privatization says it is not a matter of secrecy but of confidentiality. She told me everyone has access to the same data. But one of the bidders (CHIC) built the road and is operating it under contract and therefore knows everything there is to know about it. Surely then secrecy disadvantages the other bidders relative to CHIC. Reid was silent when I pointed this out. Why the secrecy, sorry confidentiality? She said it was to protect “confidential commercial information.”

Whose confidential information? What confidential information does a public undertaking have in a democracy? Reid had run out of answers.

There’s a smell here, but of what I’m not sure. One can think of three possible reasons for all this secrecy, none of them good:

(1) They don’t really want the best bids from the competition, just for the hometown team CHIC to win?

(2) They have some skeletons in the technology cupboard like a high rate of unbillable trips because the fancy gear isn’t quite what it was cracked up to be?

(3) Some other skullduggery.

Every uncertainty the bidders are left with because of “NCA” answers will add to their risk, and knock money off their bid. Rough on the taxpayers of Ontario. But if I were a politician up there in a sweetheart deal with CHIC I’d be high and mighty about commercial confidentiality too.

Nah! Couldn’t be that simple. Too obvious. And couldn’t be (2) because TRnl, no less, has reported the hightech gizmos of 407 work great.

What does that leave?

(3) Something much bigger? Maybe that super secure room in the very heart of the 407 control center is not really a toll management system at all, but something much more sinister. Germ warfare in the form of a super-virulent Canadian flu? A small Canadian bomb perhaps? It clearly is high time the US Govt diverted a few surveillance resources from the Mid East to the Near North. How long is it since we had a proper look around up there in the cold backyard? We Americans have obviously been lulled into a false sense of security. Always make nice, these Canads, playing proper American ball games and stuff, talking like Minnesotans. They’re obviously up to something. The Canads have obviously been exploiting our distractions with Monica and Bill. Monica? Just maybe, maybe she’s one of them... (Contact: Office of Privatization, 416 325 0408 or www. gov.on.ca/privatiz)