There is some viral nonsense making the rounds on Facebook and I’m having trouble debunking it.
If you goto the official website of the government, http://canada.ca and then search for “Grenades and tear gas” the top search result appears to show that the government was requesting grenade contractors back in 2016 in response to COVID-19. Clearly this is ridiculous but it is also hard to explain as the document appears on the real government’s website. Can one explain what website bug was exploiting that resulted in this? Here is a screen grab I just took
Mar 2, 2016 - Grenades , TearGas Attention! Are you a business that can supply products and services in support of Canada’s response to COVID-19? Canada wants to hear from you. Find out more here. Details GSIN Code N1330B GSIN Description Grenades , TearGas GSIN Category Goods GSIN Group Description Ammunition and Explosives GSIN Class Description Grenades GSIN Code
It’s associated with a link to an external website (not canada.ca) called gc.ca (still official government, it seems).
If you click through to the actual listing, the requisition is closed, and there is no text about COVID-19 at all.
I suspect that what happens is that canada.ca queries gc.ca and says, “Hey, somebody searched XXXX, what have you got?” and gc.ca replies “here’s my list of relevant pages, along with summaries”.
Now somebody at gc.ca stuck a bit of copy into the responses, so that various links would add this bit of patriotic text into the summary. It’s not included in the very next link in the search, so it seems to not be all the summaries. Somehow the summary of that old link got updated with this bit of copy.
May 30, 2013 - Grasscutting (W3713-13KN18/A) The Government of Canada needs products and services in support of Canada’s response to COVID-19. Learn how to supply a needed product or service Tender Notice Status Publishing status Awarded Days to closing 7 years 6 months ago Dates Publication date 2013/01/30 Amendment date 2013/05/30 Date closing 2013/04/09 14:00
They probably knew they would need a lot of grass cutting due to the Covid-19 mass graves.
“GC” stands for “Government of Canada” or “Gouvernement du Canada” depending on which official language you’re using. It was the original Canadian government domain, serving kind of like *.gov.uk serves as the UK government domain. They tried to migrate all the government websites to *.canada.ca some years ago, but the project sputtered out.
Oh, that. They were considering throwing them into crowds randomly in order to increase social distancing, but the PR aspect of it caused them to reconsider.
Makes sense. It still makes me suspect that the search results are somehow being served back to the search tool from multiple services, which helps explain why it shows up sporadically.
Thanks Mangetout, but that page doesn’t actually mention COVID-19 even now. It’s only in the search results summary for that page, which I doubt is archived.
So Canada.ca pulled a 1984 and wiped out the grenades and tear gas one but they left so many!!!
Go look up just grenades
or Spare Parts for Leopard
or Herkules
or General Dynamics
or Launchers, Rocket
Dates as far back as 2012!!!
And what do they need all these weapons for a flu???
And yet, somehow, for 8 long years, no one searching for Canadian government tenders on their public website ever bothered to ask, “What’s this COVID thingy they keep going on about?” I guess they were all just, “Oh, well, better not bother, I’m a sheeple anyways, I guess I just won’t wonder about it…”
