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House Hansard - 280

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 12, 2024 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 280 - Feb/12/24
Mr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC)
  • Feb/12/24 5:41:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate my colleague on an excellent speech and his excellent work. I want to ask him a question about economic reconciliation as it relates to procurement. One of the ways we advance economic reconciliation is that we seek to ensure that government procurement is available to indigenous-owned businesses as well as to businesses owned by other historically disadvantaged communities, and that there are not aspects of the procurement system that are excluding people who have been historically disadvantaged. One of the problems we have seen as we have unravelled the Auditor General's arrive scam report is that there are systems built into government procurement that are designed to advantage incumbent players; that is, someone has to have had a certain number of contracts with the Government of Canada already. This means that if someone has not dealt with the government before, has started a new business or has had other governments as clients but has have never sold products to the federal government before, they are systematically disadvantaged. In the past, I have heard from stakeholders asking, for example, why we are not meeting our targets in terms of indigenous-owned businesses' getting government procurement. We then find out, in the context of the procurement ombudsman's report, that one of the reasons is probably that there is a systematic advantage, as a result of the way the system is designed, that steers toward incumbent players and insiders, even if other people have innovative ideas. I would be curious to have the member's thoughts on how we can advance economic reconciliation by addressing some of the issues in the arrive scam scandal, and more broadly, on what prevents new entrants from participating in government procurement.
293 words
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