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“So, to me, you can’t win in the sense that we’re being judged now on a poor written submission. At the end of the day we were satisfied. The auditor general validated it that they met the technical requirements to do this job.”

However, auditor general Ken Hughes remembered things differently.

“I didn’t say that,” Hughes said later. “I have certainly spoken to the city manager about the existence of the discretionary clause. Our audit report and our presentation to audit committee represent my position on the procurement.”

The city released the technical evaluations of the Stage 2 O-Train proposals last week. The document for the Trillium Line reveals deep concerns evaluators had about SNC-Lavalin’s technical submission, to the point that evaluators recommended that SNC-Lavalin’s proposal shouldn’t be considered further.

The technical evaluators gave the SNC-Lavalin technical bid a score of 63.61 per cent, which then went up to 67.27 per cent after a requested re-evaluation. There was a 70-per-cent minimum score set in the procurement process, but the city had discretion to keep bidders alive in the competition.

Because SNC-Lavalin blew the other two bids away when it came to the financial score, it became the top-ranked proponent in the competition and received council’s endorsement for the $1.6-billion contract.