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“The terms and conditions of the RFB, including the deliverables, are not negotiable,” the government repeats. Did you read the stuff we posted?

OK, OK. But it’s August, right, and we’ll have just two weeks to compare Ontario’s budgets to what they spend in other jurisdictions. We might call Alberta and find that they’re on vacation, a potential bidder writes. “Given that it is the summer and often people are unavailable, if insufficient responses are obtained from the jurisdictional review, will the project be automatically extended?”

No. “There is no intention, at this time, to extend the timetable should jurisdictional findings be delayed,” the answer says. “The government is working under tight timelines to meet 2018-19 fiscal targets for improving program efficiency and overall value-for-money of program spending in the short-, medium-, and long-term. As such, timing of the delivery of the line-by-line review and recommendations is important to help support this commitment.”

The province doesn’t have contact information to supply; won’t put any government staff on the review team; and won’t hand over any previous work that might have been done to compare Ontario to other provinces, states or governments abroad. It will give the winning bidder access to the government’s financial-reporting system. For everything else, the outside team will be on its own.

Before the City of Ottawa did its dud of a deal a few years ago with Plasco, which promised to turn garbage into electricity cleanly and efficiently, the city commissioned a survey of comparable technologies. It was thrown together in a couple of weeks from database entries kept by a consulting firm, some of them outdated. The report was obsolete before it was delivered, which was fantastic for a document purporting to describe state-of-the-art technology. But the thing fulfilled its purpose. It gave the city a study to wave around.

That’s what this “line by line audit” is shaping up to be for the province: Done fast, on the cheap, using whatever data is lying around. With results and recommendations of a quality to match.

dreevely@postmedia.com

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