Thank you for the question.
That's a very interesting question. About four years ago, we had an evaluation of the office done to ensure that the office was operating as intended in terms of the mandate given to us by the Government of Canada. One of the things that we received as feedback from the evaluators was that in their discussions with suppliers who had dealt with us and our office, the suppliers had requested that our monetary thresholds be increased so that our office would be able to assist them in more cases and more situations.
At that time, we decided to take a look at the policy rationale for why it was that those monetary thresholds had been established for our office. We hired some external folks to undertake some analysis and provide us with a report. That report is available on our website.
Fundamentally, the response was that when we were established with regard to the awarding of contracts, the idea or the policy rationale was that we should be able to help in situations where the Canadian International Trade Tribunal cannot, so our monetary thresholds are underneath those of the trade agreements—roughly.
The idea was that the government did not want to give suppliers the opportunity to “doctor shop”, which means that when you get an answer that you don't like from one doctor, you go to the next one until they give you what you want. They didn't want that to happen between us and the CITT, so that's why those thresholds were identified.