Let me come back to the issue.
Our purpose in life, really, is to help people get their business, to help them solve their issues over here. We are not here to ensure that any particular person gets a contract. We are here to ensure that the contracts are awarded in a fair, open, and transparent manner.
My constituents, the people who can complain to me, are all Canadian suppliers. The act says that. It's defined in a way that American suppliers cannot come and complain to me. You must have a place of business in Canada to come to the procurement office.
The second issue, and this is important also, is that we are a trading nation. These are policy issues, but we are a trading nation. We have to give access to our trading partners through our contracts if we are going to get access to their market. Those are considerations people have looked at: is the market out there 15 times bigger than ours? I'm not passing judgment on that, but I'm saying those are part of the judgments and information people deal with when you're saying “only Canadian”. If you're going to give contracts to only Canadians, fine, but then they'll give contracts to only Americans.
I don't have a view on it, but I simply make that comment as a concerned citizen.