I'll say a few words using the one-pager that I appended to my remarks, and I'll let Mr. Ring expand on this.
The technical authority, in this case DND, could be another department. If it were a vaccine, it could be PHAC, Health Canada. Essentially, it comes up with the basic requirements. We refer to them as technical requirements. As they do this, they also carry out analysis. They look to see if there are potential competitive fields at the macro level, so they carry out a number of very in-depth reviews. They start interacting with us, and our responsibility is one of validating that either a competition is to be had, because there is a procurement competitive field, or that a sole-source acquisition is justified.
If we see and validate that the rationale provided, as explained by Mr. Ring before, supports a sole-source acquisition, this is allowed in the Government of Canada contracting regulations. There are a number of exceptions. If I remember, there are four of them: one has to do with value—below $25,000; one has to do with emergencies, which kind of makes sense; one has to do with public interest; and one has to do with it being the sole company that can meet the requirements identified by the technical authority and validated by the contracting authority.
I'll just let Mr. Ring say a few more words about this. It's a very important field.