Thank you for the question.
I'm not surprised people are skeptical about this effort. I understand that the small and medium business community and the industry have been lobbying Ottawa for several years. It's not a partisan thing; they've been around here, and they've noted something that anybody, really, could have observed: if you're trying to do business with the Government of Canada and you're provided with an 80-page RFP with links to various websites that have other criteria for the supply of desks, and if you're a small company with six or seven people in the head office who are doing all sorts of other functions, you don't have time to go through all this, while the bigger guys can have staff totally devoted and dedicated to understanding how to do business with us--so there's an imbalance in terms of the competitive environment.
The first part of what we need to do was the easiest. It was to announce this. That was the easy part: you announce this and say we're going to do this. The really tough part, where the rubber meets the road, is exactly what you said: how are you going to measure this and how are you going to bring these people to the table?
I think we're going to bring small and medium business people to the table by doing a number of things. Among those things, we need to simplify the rules. Rather than face 80-page RFPs, they have to face 12-page RFPs. Rather than facing 25-page RFPs, they should be facing 8-page RFPs.
Right now in Mr. Marshall's department, a review is going on of what has been built of standard clauses over decades. A clause becomes a standard clause because there was a case, and somebody said you have to put this clause in or the Supreme Court will reverse this in some other case. Finally, you end up with a million of these standard clauses. The fact of the matter is, when small business owners go into our system and read the RFPs, they're confused and discouraged after the first four pages, so they just chuck the thing and don't move on, and that's sad. It's sad because we lose.
As I said earlier, normally the more people we have at the table--and I think this was your comment--the better the prices we'll have.
More importantly, small and medium business enterprises in this country have always been very creative and very innovative, but we're closing ourselves off from this wonderful basket of innovation and creativity. We can't allow this to continue; hence, the Office of Small and Medium Business Enterprises is out there to help these folks do business with us. While that's happening, Mr. Marshall's department is looking at all these RFPs, taking out the mumbo-jumbo that doesn't need to be there anymore, and facilitating the MERX system.
In a small shop in Truro or in your riding in Burlington, when somebody who is, let's say, a supplier of microphones or some sort of a technology goes on the system, they click on technology and can immediately see what's on offer. They double-click on the stuff that interests them and within a reasonable time--not four hours, but perhaps half an hour--they know what's on offer and what the conditions of offer are, and that's really critical.