Part of the issue is that everybody is trying to play a role. The legal unit will step up and say that we must eliminate all potential legal risk. They'll lay out all of the requirements, including something like unlimited liability, which, for a company that signs a $75,000 contract, means you have to put up unlimited liability versus the government. That means that my entire company is up for grabs from the government if they decide to pursue me over a $75,000 contract.
It's off-loading. What the government's attempting to do—and that's just one example of legal risk—is to off-load all of the potential risk onto that private sector entity. Nobody likes it, neither SMEs nor large companies. Nobody in the marketplace thinks that things like unlimited liability and prescriptive Ts and Cs are the best way to go, but legal is trying to do their best job, so they want to eliminate all potential risk for the government.
As well, procurement is trying to eliminate all potential risk for the government, so they're putting in the procedures and principles that have been in place for a long time to limit the amount of risk.
Well, when you do that—when you limit legal risk and you limit the risk from a security perspective and you limit the procurement risk and the potential for it to be challenged at a trade tribunal—what you end up doing is limiting over and over again the number of bidders who are going to be willing to take part in that procurement, because you're off-loading all of those requirements onto the private sector.