I hesitate to describe it as reckless since I believe closed tendering is employed by other orders of government, including the federal government. I think there are lots of reasons for closed tendering. The City of Montreal is one example. Provincial regulations certainly play a pretty big role and were enacted in the late eighties. There are many reasons to do this. Some of the reasons are definitely no longer valid, as Mr. Dijkema suggested, and they need to be reviewed.
I'm not sure that federal regulation is the most efficient way of doing that in every case. One of Mr. Dijkema's recommendations was that the federal government work with the provinces to ensure that provincial procurement rules ensure that federal infrastructure dollars are invested as efficiently as possible. To me, it feels like a more flexible and targeted approach than a one-size-fits-all federal regulation.
I'm not suggesting that FCM is in favour of rules that are going to drive up costs. That's a leap of logic that isn't necessarily borne out by quantitative evidence, which there doesn't seem to be a lot of.