Government Operations committee  Madam Chair, I'm relatively new, but I have 30 years of experience in the procurement business, with 28 years at the AG's office and a couple of years at Public Works. So I think I knew where to go and that's one of the reasons why we got off to a good start this year. How do pe

Government Operations committee  Thank you. Let me just clarify two issues. First, I don't negotiate. We facilitate. It's not a negotiating process at all. We do facilitate, though. Second, I am not the Public Works ombudsman. I'm the ombudsman for procurement of the federal government and I have a government-w

Government Operations committee  Madam Chair, I don't know if the position was created solely in response to the sponsorship issue, but I think it was created because almost everybody agreed that procurement, which in itself is supposed to be a means to an end to help government departments achieve their program

Government Operations committee  Madam Chair, that's a fascinating question. it really requires a little bit of explanation. We have a business model which says essentially that we would work in collaboration with all the stakeholders: the suppliers and the procurement community. We would rather do things in a

Government Operations committee  Let me close just by saying that yes, we are, and we have done some research on a number of topics that we think would be of interest to the government. We've already given them the results for one of those. We compared standing offers to order practices in the U.S. We have two o

Government Operations committee  Madam Chair, if I may say so, not just in ACANs, but in every facet of government procurement, it is the duty of the government to ensure that a fair and transparent process happens. Now, how are we doing that? Every report that we're doing looks at fairness. Fairness is procedu

Government Operations committee  Yes. That's where you would.... On the ACAN process, you noticed that one of the issues we've raised with everybody here is that there's a lack of documentation in the files for anybody to get any firm conclusions if the ACAN was really necessary. Should you have invoked one of

Government Operations committee  What we did this year was try to find out why it is happening. There were two explanations we got this year. One was resource constraints. People said they didn't have enough time to do the transaction and asked, “Where do we find the time to do the file?” The second one was on

Government Operations committee  I think the processes are as Parliament has set out. There's the CITT that people go to and complain if they become aware of this stuff. There are the judicial reviews. There's our office that has now been established where we can do this stuff. I agree with you completely: the

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Let me just start by explaining that the mandate given to our office is a very progressive mandate. Let me start by saying that. It's quite different from an audit mandate. We are not auditors who go in after the transaction and come back and report defi

Government Operations committee  I do, Madam Chair.

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me and my colleagues here today, and for your continued interest in the work of my office. This committee played a leading role in the design of our mandate and I consider the committee to

Government Operations committee  The honest answer is that I could not recommend a policy matter. I can recommend how to implement a policy and how to better implement a policy, but the foundation of the policy is somebody else's responsibility.

Government Operations committee  Thank you.

Government Operations committee  There are two issues. I'm surprised about the concern as to how much it costs to go to CITT. My understanding was you didn't even need a lawyer to go to CITT, but you could talk to them about their processes. On the second issue, I understand fully that SMEs have a problem when