Category: Procurement

It is amazing how much information goes back and forth between a buyer and the supplier community during a procurement action. We can call it communicating, but at each step in the process there is a risk that communication will actually be little more than noise...

In April 2014 the Environics Institute and the Institute on Governance surveyed Canadian attitudes toward major Canadian institutions. Not being an actual institution, public procurement was not mentioned: that was nice, because it was not pilloried yet again.

The president of the Treasury Board gave a speech in November at the University of Ottawa for the launch of the Open Government Action Plan. His message was clear:

Last month I supported the argument that if a received bid does not comply with some minor aspect of a call for bids, but the non-compliance will not put either the procurement or the resulting contract at risk, the bid should be accepted and the bidder given time to “fix” the problem.

Roy Wiseman’s blog, "In defence of direct negotiation," on the CGE blog site (cgexecblog.wordpress.com) is well worth a read. So too is the 2012-2013 Annual Report of the Procurement Ombudsman, Frank Brunetta...

As difficult as they may be to accept, we all know that disagreements and disputes are unavoidable in life. The world of federal procurement is no exception.

When the government introduced the Defence Procurement Strategy in February, it laid out three priorities: delivering the right equipment in a timely manner; leveraging the purchase of defence equipment to create jobs and economic growth; and streamlining the acquisition process.

I used to be responsible for managing the s9 delegation file, and after a while the question occurred: what exactly are those “any Acts of Parliament”?