Thousands of kilometers to travel to shred paper

A call for tenders bringing together all regions of Quebec allowed a Montreal company to obtain the shredding contract. It may have to deploy trucks in all regions of Quebec to collect the paper, and then bring it back, shredded, to Montreal.

François Mercier is the owner of a small business with two employees working in the field of confidential paper destruction called Destruction DD in Malartic.

His company has been hired for several years by the Abitibi-Témiscamingue Integrated Health and Social Services Center (CISSS-AT) to search for confidential documents in different hospitals in the region and then shred them in the factory.

This private contract with the organization represents a third of its annual turnover, but he has just learned that his agreement ended abruptly in the last few weeks.

This is because a recent call for tenders from the Government Acquisitions Center resulted in the awarding of a single contract on August 20 to serve almost all of the province’s hospitals for the destruction of confidential documents.

Iron Mountain Canada, a multinational company, was awarded the contract worth $5 million.

To see that you get hit by a giant without even having the possibility of fighting back, they just gave more power to a big company to weaken a regional companyexplains François Mercier, who did not see this announcement coming.

He specifies that he was not informed that a provincial call for tenders had been launched.

If I had been informed, I probably would have been able to react since I still have a partner at the provincial level with whom I managed to have another contract. They didn’t tell me the fact that they were going to a call for tenders, I was speechless when they told me that.he adds, specifying that he does not blame the CISSS of Abitibi-Témiscamingue, who has no control over the situation, according to him.

Considering that we are users of confidential document destruction services, we were obliged to join this provincial call for tendersexplains by email the CISSS of Abitibi-Témiscamingue.

The organization specifies that this is the first time that this call for tenders brings together all regions of Quebec.

A significant environmental impact

Destruction DD has had the practice, for many years, of collecting paper directly from hospitals in padlocked boxes to transport it to a factory where it is shredded. The MRC Vallée-de-l’Or, in the Val-d’Or sector, then uses it to make compost.

Iron Mountain Canada currently has no employees in most of the regions covered by the call for tenders. Employees will therefore leave Montreal by truck to shred the paper in the region and bring it back to Montreal. In certain regions such as the North Shore, Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Gaspésie, we are talking about more than 1000 kilometers for each trip.

They add trucks on the way. We have just added one more traveler who comes to Abitibi to collect material that the rest of us composted and kept. They’re bringing it back to Montreal nowsays François Mercier, who intends to offer Iron Mountain Canada to do the service for them in order to avoid this problem.

We agree that it makes no sense to have trucks come up here to transport shredded paper. On the environmental side, it makes no sense and on the economic side, I’m sure it’s not the best solution eitheradds the president of the Rouyn-Noranda Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Stéphane Brown, who is concerned about the fact that sectors other than health have also started to make grouped calls for tenders.

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We understand the concept of the government trying to save costs, however as soon as we go to provincial calls for tenders, it is certain that regional contractors can suffer and as we see, there are contracts which are lost in favor of large centershe says.

The regions that are suffering

Stéphane Brown is not convinced that the Quebec government is making real savings, particularly regarding the destruction of documents.

Ultimately, I’m not sure it would be cheaper to send this to companies in Montreal. I think that if the government thought about it, it would realize that it might be more expensive to do that. Once again, it is the regions that bear the brunt of the government’s centralist decisionsadds Stéphane Brown.

All contracts negotiated by the government body for which we have the possibility of being served by a provincial supplier, for products and services for which we are consumers, can be given to a supplier having the capacity to serve all of the participating regions at the lowest pricespecifies by email on CISSS of Abitibi-Témiscamingue.