Ottawa's city manager acknowledged Wednesday that SNC-Lavalin wrote a "terrible" bid for the contract to build the extension for the Trillium Line, but said the written submission "isn't a big part" of the overall bid.

"Well it isn't a big part, it's a written submission — that's an important part — but that's a written submission. There's subjectivity," Steve Kanellakos told reporters after Wednesday's council meeting.

"Everyone is trying to make out a procurement process as if it's so pure and perfect, and black and white, pass/fail — it's not. We have hundreds of people meeting with their technical people assessing what their response is."

It's the first time the city manager has spoken publicly about SNC-Lavalin's controversial bid for the Trillium Line Stage 2 contract, worth $1.6 billion, since the technical evaluation team's presentation to the bid were released late last Thursday.

Not only did the five-member evaluation team of experts chosen by the city fail to give SNC-Lavalin a score that met the threshold score of 70 per cent — in two separate rounds of scoring — the evaluators reached a "unanimous consensus that the proposal should not be considered further in the evaluation process."

Instead, the city used its discretionary power to allow SNC-Lavalin to continue onto the financial evaluation. The Montreal-based conglomerate had the lowest price, which gave it the most points overall.

Ottawa auditor general Ken Hughes tabled his report on the Trillium Line Stage 2 procurement on Nov. 26, 2019. He found the city had followed the rules. (Jean Delisle/CBC)

Kanellakos said that SNC-Lavalin met with the "entire team" to address the concerns the city had before the city's executive recommended the company as the preferred proponent to council, which gave the final green-light to the contract.

It is unclear exactly who at the city met with SNC-Lavalin before the item went to council.

The city manager also posited that residents would have been upset if they hadn't used their discretion to allow SNC-Lavalin to continue in the bidding process, and told reporters that he discussed the issue with the the city's auditor general.

"As the auditor general said to me, 'Can you imagine, Mr. Kanellakos, if you excluded [SNC-Lavalin] for missing three or four points on … their technical score and in the end they became several hundred million dollars cheaper than any other bid — what would the taxpayer be saying? For three points, they'd be saying, what a bureaucrat you are. You cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars more because you didn't use any discretion or common sense to look at the three or four points that they missed.'"

Reached by email, the city's auditor general Ken Hughes said categorically that he never made those comments to Kanellakos.

"I didn't say that," said Hughes in an email, although he did speak with Kanellakos about the existence and use of the discretionary clause.

Last November, Hughes tabled an audit that found the procurement process had technically broken no rules, although he called for more transparency surrounding this sort of bid in the future.

Coun. Shawn Menard tabled a motion calling for an independent third party to review the LRT Stage 2 decision-making process, which will be debated at the next council meeting in February.