Our curiosity is naturally aroused when people wage major battles in protection or defence of particular programmes or policies, such as is currently the case with the scrap by trade unions to maintain Blue Cross' management of the health-insurance scheme for public sectoremployees.

The usual question is: What is it that motivates such action?. In this case, we assume that the unions are keen to do their jobs of protecting the interest of the workers - even if on this occasion, they are doing so with unusual energy and significant expense.

For. not only are the union bosses utilising the normal channels to make their case to the public, they are willing to pay for the opportunity. Unusually, they have been placing advertisements in newspapers stating what they believe went wrong in the bidding for the contract and implying that the process was skewed in favour of Life of Jamaica (LoJ).

Whether any of the allegations of supposed misfeasance on the part of the Ministry of Finance is true, we do not know. Neither can we pronounce on the technical aspects of the bid, in the absence of a clear, open, and critically, unemotive discussion of all the facts.

However, a number of points are worth observing, not least, the opinion of the Contractor General, Mr. Greg Christie, on the efficacy of the tender process.

There are many things that you might say with reasonable truth about Mr. Christie and the conduct of his job, none of which is that he is not diligent or that he is politically partisan. Indeed, members of this administration, which, incidentally, appointed Mr. Christie, have had reasons to rue his tenure, not least being his intervention on the Sandals Whitehouse affair or the failure of agencies to report on the contracts into which they have entered.

So, when Mr. Christie says that the tender and evaluation process for the health-scheme contract followed the declared rules, we are inclined to be convinced. It will require robust arguments and hard facts to impeach Mr. Christie, in our view.

But, should Mr. Christie have made a mistake and the Finance Ministry erred, deliberately or otherwise, in evaluating the bids, we would support a new tender, which is opposed by the unions. The other option would be to hand the contract to Blue Cross and to maintain the old status. Indeed, for the better part of a decade, this contract, involving the expenditure of over $2 billion of taxpayers' money, went to Blue Cross via private treaty. It was overseen by a committee comprising mostly trade-union officials.

It required great pressure, starting with newspaper questions and editorials, for the contract to be opened to public bidding. Indeed, the Office of the Contractor General also applied pressure.

It is perhaps not unreasonable that the unions have, over the years, reached a comfort level with Blue Cross and that it is difficult for the bosses to contemplate changing to another insurance provider. The development of such affairs is understandable.

In the instant case, however, our concern in the end is not who wins the contract, but that the process has been open and fair and that cronyism does not determine how taxpayers' money is spent.

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