‘Ships Start Here’ campaign broke rules: CTF
Posted Feb 28, 2012 08:33:59 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation says the Dexter government broke its own rules for spending with the untendered contract for the Ships Start Here campaign.
The province spent more than $620,000 on the advertisement campaign to promote Halifax’s Irving Shipyard which won the $25 billion federal shipbuilding contract last October.
The Atlantic division of the CTF now says documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show the contract wasn’t tendered – and hundreds of thousands of dollars remain unaccounted for.
“The government should not be giving an untendered contract to anyone until it’s approved by the treasury board,” said Atlantic director Kevin Lacey. “What we saw from this information is that those approvals did come until three months after money had already been spent.”
Lacey says several invoices the province received from MT&L Public Relations don’t show what the firm did for its fee.
“What we see is, hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money going to an untendered contract, to a public relations firm, and in the end taxpayers have little to nothing to show for it,” said Lacey.
Lacey says the campaign was a waste of money that had no effect on the federal government’s decision to award Irving the contract.
The total cost of the campaign was $1.4 million.
