It's certainly possible that regulations could be constructed, provided that we're only dealing with contracts under the trade agreement thresholds. So if you were talking about contracts under $100,000 for services...although even then you're going to run into a problem with the government contracts regulations, which require an open and competitive bidding process. So then you're really talking about contracts under $25,000.
For contracts that are under $25,000 for services and goods, you could potentially, I guess, create a regulatory regime that would discriminate against a certain class of service providers--maybe. The only reason I say “maybe” is that I just want to be very careful about that potential. So the government would be faced with the task of trying to find a way to carve a set of regulations that would be narrow enough in the monetary amount of contracts that it could still incorporate.
I keep saying “discriminatory” because in the procurement world that's what it is.
If you were going to do that, as long as you kept it under $25,000 you would probably be okay. But even under $25,000, while it's not a regulatory requirement, the government still tries to compete where possible. It's just the notion that if you have an open and transparent bidding process, then you only have the relevant factors coming into play on the actual criteria that you sent out and that companies are coming back and bidding against.
I'm struggling with trying to figure out how we could do the regulations. The only thing I keep coming back to is that if we were staying under $25,000, then it might be possible to do the regulations.