MONTREAL — A severe shortage of competent engineers at Quebec's Transport Department left it ill-equipped to detect and prevent corruption, a public inquiry heard Monday.
Jacques Duchesneau said engineers who work for the province are often young, inexperienced and lack the proper educational background.
To make matters worse, he said, they often find themselves dealing with former superiors who've jumped to the private sector. Senior employees would jump straight to higher-paying jobs at firms that were bidding on government contracts, he said.
"People left the department and, the next week, they were already with private firms. This caused a problem on the ethical front, at the very least, and reduced expertise," said Duchesneau, a former Montreal police chief and federal transportation-safety official.
Testifying at Quebec's corruption inquiry, Duchesneau said there was so much paperwork to do, engineers didn't have time to go actual sites as often as they'd like. Duchesneau said the shortage of government expertise has also forced municipalities to use private engineering firms, which often suggest work that isn't necessary.
As for the background of employees hired by the Transport Department, he said it somtimes left a little to be desired. Instead of civil engineers, he said, the government was hiring the wrong types of experts.
"They went to get engineers with different specialties not necessarily linked to infrastructure. Whether it's electrical engineering, computer engineering," said Duchesneau, who most recently authored an anti-corruption report for the province.
"There was even a case of one nuclear engineer."
Duchesneau was testifying for a third day, accompanied by two of his former employees who are discussing cases of collusion between entrepreneurs or a lack of competition in bidding.
Last week, he told the inquiry that the provincial transport minister seemed bored and indifferent to his findings on corruption.
Sam Hamad, who was transport minister at the time, told reporters that he found such recollections puzzling—given that the Charest government had moved to implement all of Duchesneau's recommendations.
Duchesneau also revealed problems with other sectors of Quebec's construction industry. The former investigator explained that despite having 175 asphalt companies operating in the province, two exert enough influence to control the entire industry.
Those two companies, responsible for 60 per cent of output, control all the others by supplying asphalt at a good price to a limited number of firms.
The bidding process is also broken. When the lowest bidder bows out of a contract after winning it, the next firm gets the business, no matter how much higher the bid is. Often, both companies are owned by the same person.
"It's like a piece of theatre. It's really the orders for contracts at the beginning of the year that determine who will get the contract or not," said Duchesneau. "For the bigger companies, if their orders are full, they will call on smaller companies to fill this or that part of the contract."
The commission will continue hearing Duchesneau for the rest of the week before adjourning until mid-September.
