Mission impossible?
No clear answers on Nalcor contractors
At the Muskrat Falls project, Nalcor currently employs 498 embedded contractors performing a variety of professional service functions; in the rest of Nalcor, it’s anybody’s guess.
Earlier this summer, The Telegram filed a series of access to information requests attempting to figure out how many contractors are working on an hourly basis at Nalcor, indistinguishable from full-time regular staff.
When it comes to the Lower Churchill Project, Nalcor readily provided the data, but for the other lines of business, the Crown corporation said an accurate answer was impossible.
“Due to difference is recordkeeping practices at LCP versus Nalcor and Hydro, it was not possible to create such a list for Nalcor and Hydro contractors/consultants without individually manually accessing approximately 48,000 paper contracts and all the invoices that have been submitted during the term of each contract,” the company said in a formal access to information response letter.
In a separate request, The Telegram asked for all Nalcor employees who have a company email address, but are not actually employed by Nalcor. In total, 139 non-employees have email addresses with the company, not counting board of directors members and members of the Muskrat Falls management team.
CEO Stan Marshall said that he doesn’t know what portion of the Nalcor workforce is embedded contractors, but when he was first hired last year, his impression was that the company was using too many contractors.
“When I looked at Hydro, for example, I saw that a portion of people working as engineers and whatnot in Hydro itself was high, and for me, it seemed to be very high,” Marshall said.
He said he pushed the company to hire many of those people on a full-time basis instead of employing them as hourly-rate contractors.
Nalcor won’t say how much it’s paying embedded contractors on an hourly basis, saying that the information is commercially sensitive.
On Saturday, The Telegram reported that embedded contractors have invoiced a total of roughly 4.6 million hours for professional services.
When it comes to Nalcor’s heavy reliance on hourly rate professional services contractors for the Muskrat Falls project, opposition politicians said that the information reported by The Telegram raises serious concerns.
“Firstly, I think it speaks to lack of oversight, and I think it speaks to lack of controls,” said independent MHA Paul Lane.
Tory MHA Keith Hutchings said that Nalcor really should tell the public how much individual contractors are being paid, and he’s not at all convinced that it’s commercially sensitive information.
“This is a Crown corporation. You know, it’s publicly owned. If that information exists, I think it should be made available,” Hutching said.
New Democrat Leader Earle Mccurdy pointed out that the heavy reliance on contractors exposes the dishonesty of the government’s sales pitch back when Muskrat Falls was conceived, about the hydroelectric expertise that already existed within Nalcor.
“I think it becomes more and more apparent that we weren’t getting the straight goods up front,” he said.
“Selling the project took precedence over environmental prudence, rigour on cost controls and keeping costs under control, on safety aspects and so on. All those things took second place to chest-thumping and selling the project.”