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Opinion: How our procurement policy perversely works against Canadian startups and innovators

Ottawa's purchasers require massive paper dumps that are easy for big, established, often foreign companies but not for Canadian startups

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Since 2024, Ottawa has rolled out a steady stream of funding and policy initiatives aimed at bolstering Canada’s tech sectors, particularly AI. It has also pledged to fix long-standing procurement woes, including through such initiatives as the Defence Procurement Strategy. An important part of the fix is to apply principles of “agile development” to how government buys technology. It’s a problem for this country that government procurement still mainly follows an older, now outdated “waterfall” approach: nothing is tendered or built until a massive specification is written.

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