I can start, Chair.
Thank you for the question.
In terms of the recommendation you referred to from the Jenkins report, the call to the government was to consider how it could elevate and integrate innovation more witin the procurement practices of all departments. I think consideration of that recommendation is under way. I would leave it to colleagues at Public Works and Government Services to respond and perhaps provide more specific information to the committee if you had an interest in the subject. I can speak only generally to it.
I think the area is important. It's a question of balancing and assessing the variety of requirements one has to consider when making a purchasing decision for any department under current policies. We have to balance being competitive in cost when buying the goods and services required for the Government of Canada at a price that's defensible to the taxpayer. That's a primary consideration.
A very important second one is the requirements we have under trade agreements regarding how we will undertake to procure goods and services. The third consideration is other mandates, such as support for sustainable development, support for aboriginal business, and so forth. There are a variety of requirements, so procurement requires us to balance a number of policy objectives.
I think the debate, rightly, is about whether innovation is an objective that should be more enshrined or encoded in government policy. Then the question would be how to put that into practice and balance the risk around it. You don't want to give licence, obviously, to government managers to take huge bets and risks with taxpayers' money on things that are not well vetted, or when it's not understood what those risks might be, when essentially most procurement is driven by just buying a good or service that's required as an input to some process in a department. I don't want to complicate things, but part of our job is to do that.
That's more or less the debate around it. Of course, it's up to the Minister of Public Works and Government Services and the President of the Treasury Board to articulate if there are changes in policy in this area in response to Jenkins. We'll await that determination.