That's a good question. I'm a bit of a policy nerd, so I love talking about policy and what could be.
I really want to fixate on the role of a centralized office in creating transparency around this policy. A lot of my comments in my opening remarks were fixated on data gaps. Subcontracting is the most obvious gap, in my view, but sourcing is as well. Without this data, it's very difficult for an independent person like me, or even the attentive public, to draw conclusions on what buy Canadian can do, or even...the delta between the status quo and buy Canadian, going forward.
We'll see a lot of big numbers. This is not a problem unique to the Canadian federal government either. We're seeing this with provinces as well. They've listed some really massive and attractive contract values going to domestic suppliers. The issue is that they're defining “domestic supplier” by address, which doesn't go far enough. I focus a lot on the leakages question, because I think it's the big issue here. We can quibble over the thresholds being quite high.
The other thing I didn't mention in my statement is this: We're clearly trying to play through exceptions within trade agreements with national security language. I think this is a fairly astute approach, going after larger-value contracts while provinces go after low-value contracts. There's more to be gained here, providing we get it right in terms of the data.
Thanks.