Courts or Policies: Who's best at defining procurement practices?

What’s your response to the criticism that Canada is using its legal system to define things in federal procurements as opposed to centralized policies?

This question is loaded with perspectives. You have Procurement Officers who want things to run smoothly. There are GC business owners who want to know how they can get what they need with clear expectations so they can fulfill their mandate. You have the highest level of government that wants procurement to run like a well-oiled machine. You have industry that seeks clarity and fairness. You have taxpayers that want the GC to spend as little money in courts as possible so as to maximize spending on program delivery or tax reductions. In one sense, all of this seems to align with centralized policies.

In another sense, it does not align with centralized policies at all to the point of requiring legal precedents to be established. Procurement Officers need to be trained and well-versed in translating the needs of business owners into something industry can respond to – an ever-shifting landscape with shifting values to boot. Business owners look at operational needs first and anything else as a potential barrier, resulting in them acting accordingly more often than not. Governments are elected to spend money with a social purpose, thereby not allowing public servants to simply cross the street and swipe a credit card, regardless of volume or dollar savings. Industry wants to capitalize on its products and services, seemingly at the expense of their competitors, but not always. Taxpayers will only eat what they are fed – and they have not been fed a simple comparison between the use of a legal system versus centralized policies to govern GC procurements.

Returning to the original question of approach, I see GC procurement as linking the ability to tap into industrial innovation (something the GC does through contracting) with/to efficiency of government. The latter is highly ideological and the former is highly driven and context-dependent. What is the best way to ensure fairness with all this variability?

On one hand, using a legal system requires a high degree of communication and dissemination of decisions to enable fairness amidst all that variability to be put into practice. On the other hand, centralized policies are inherently better at the dissemination piece so long as there are no gatekeepers and can keep pace with correctly interpreting contemporary values and desires of all the above stakeholders.

As a result, I posit the notion that both are needed. The gold standard seems to be a root of ultimate fairness that is disseminated widely and uniformly without barriers or delays. How can that be achieved?