A senior government employee says the Department of Foreign Affairs abused its authority in awarding millions of dollars worth of contracts last summer for the emergency evacuation of Canadians from Lebanon.

In government e-mails obtained by the CBC, a senior analyst for the Treasury Board asked why Foreign Affairs continued to break contracting rules for at least a week after it was told to stop.

"I find it difficult to understand why [Foreign Affairs] went ahead with contract award," the senior policy analyst wrote, even though Public Works met with Foreign Affairs a week earlier "and committed to providing a quick turn-around to ensure contracts are in place" for the evacuation.

The internal correspondences, which the CBC sought through the Access to Information Act, appeared to show a growing frustration on the part of the Treasury Board about the way millions of dollars of taxpayers' money was handled.

Foreign Affairs overspent its emergency allowance by at least $8 million when it should have realized it did not have the "contracting capacity to award such a contract," the analyst writes.

Foreign Affairs realized it was in over its head, too, the e-mail said: "The fact [Foreign Affairs] asked [Public Works] to ratify a contract indicates a knowledge/capacity problem!"

Of the 219 pages of e-mails released, only 12 pages contained information that was not completely blanked out to keep directions from top cabinet officials confidential.

'Keep this abuse … in mind'

In the future, the government "should keep this abuse of delegated emergency contracting authority in mind," reads one of the analyst's partially blanked-out messages.

Last summer, about 15,000 Lebanese-Canadians accepted Ottawa's offer of free passage to Canada during the more than four weeks of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah fighters.

Most were taken from the port of Beirut by ship to either Cyprus or Turkey, where they caught flights to Canada. A number of government sources have told the CBC the final costs of the evacuation could top $100 million, but the total has yet to be tallied.

NDP MP Alexa McDonough said the public has a right to know how money was spent during the evacuation.

"I think it makes a mockery of the Conservative government's supposed commitment to greater accountability and transparency," she said.

McDonough has called for the auditor general to look into the matter.

"I guess what they think is that the public will say, 'Oh, it's an emergency so government has to do most anything,' but, of course, you have emergency procedures to make sure this isn't the case," she said.