In its 2024 annual report, Ontario’s Auditor General found that the provincial government failed to follow its established procedures in a call for development (CFD) process for the redevelopment of Ontario Place, a project with an estimated total cost of $2.2 billion, including over $500 million in public funding.
Citing many instances in which the process rules were not followed, the Auditor General concluded that the CFD decisions “were not fair, transparent or accountable to all participants.” For example, notwithstanding pre-established “no contact” protocols for the competition, the Auditor General found that some participants were “invited to meet with government officials and high-ranking political staff” during the open competition period. Further, the report found that minutes of meetings with participants were not kept during the process, which made it impossible for the auditor to determine whether all participants had equal access to information during the competition.
The report also raised bid evaluation concerns, noting that the evaluation criteria were not finalized until after the submission deadline. Further, as the report detailed, the evaluation criteria were not assigned relative weightings, which led to “uneven scoring of submissions by assessors.” In fact, while the pre-established evaluation framework required evaluators to take detailed notes, the report found “many instances in where assessors had taken no notes” and where no scores were assigned prior to consensus scoring meetings. The report also found that some proponents were short-listed even after ranking lower than other non-shortlisted proponents.
As the Auditor General noted, the government sidestepped the rules that typically apply to procurement processes by characterizing the project as a “real estate transaction.” For example, the report found that the process rules required proponents to sign a non-disclosure agreement that allowed the province to award the development deal to a party that never participated in the competition, or to a party that submitted a non-compliant proposal. As the Auditor General noted, some of the participants admitted that they “did not invest a significant amount of time and resources in developing their submissions as the outcomes of the process were not well defined.”
The Auditor General recommended that the province’s future land development contract awards follow more clearly defined procurement procedures and best practices. As this case study illustrates, when government bodies bypass established tendering procedures, they risk undermining the credibility of their ultimate contract award decisions.
