Thank you for the question.
Yes, as I mentioned in my message in the annual report, one of the things I heard about last year was from suppliers who were raising questions and concerns about standing offers. If you take a look at prior annual reports from my office, you'll see that standing offers are an area that generates a lot of questions and some concerns on the part of Canadian suppliers.
One of the reasons why I think that's the case is that, for many suppliers, the concept of a standing offer differs from what they experience in the private sector. In the private sector, there do not seem to be as many types of agreements between private sector companies where one company essentially agrees to undertake some activities on an as-and-when-needed basis for no guaranteed source of business. Standing offers appear to be something that is somewhat unique to the public service.
In our office, one of the things we do through our outreach-and-educate pillar, which I mentioned, is to ensure that suppliers understand that when it comes to standing offers there are certain expectations and obligations that are placed on them and certain expectations and obligations that are placed on federal organizations, but that there is not necessarily a guarantee of business. Because of that, when it comes to planning out their business strategies in terms of submitting proposals, they need to take those factors into consideration so they can ensure they have a proposal that will work for them from a business perspective.