In all the recent talk of trade wars, tariffs and buying Canadian, I didn’t expect procurement to feature prominently. I couldn’t be more pleased to see it on the radar.
Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe recently said that the city is “working hard to protect our local economy and ensure the City’s procurement practices prioritize local and Canadian products … Let’s be strategic in our buying decisions to support local companies and workers.”
As someone who has long advocated for procurement reform to protect the public interest, I couldn’t be more supportive. But the devil is in the proverbial details; it’s important to get things right.
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Let’s set a baseline: procurement isn’t just shopping local. When we choose to buy tomatoes from Suntech Greenhouses, we’re choosing to buy locally grown products and support our local community, just as we choose to buy Canadian plywood from a locally owned Home Hardware instead of a U.S. big box retail chain. These are good choices that support our communities.
Professional services procurement is a tool for public authorities to get the best results for the best value. This is often confused as being “best price,” even though that’s not the intent. Best value is defined by government as a broad set of criteria that include “environmental and ethical considerations and socio-economic benefits to Canadians.” Procurement of professional services should deliver good results, even if those results are measured in better quality of life, better experiences and better value that we might only realize over generations.
In the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, many municipalities announced they would tweak their procurement process to freeze out American entities from getting a piece of public contracts. It’s a perfectly sensible reaction to unfair and unprovoked tariffs.
But now that we’ve demonstrated that procurement rules can be changed to protect our national interest, we should keep our minds open and consider other changes that would also give us beautiful, accessible, safe and smart cities we can be proud of, while protecting our interests and economy.
We should instill national pride in our places as much as we celebrate pride in local brewers, local farmers and local tourism.
And in case anyone wonders if architecture matters economically, a 2018 study proved that it does; it directly affects 14 per cent or more of our GDP. Architecture and engineering are responsible for the critical services necessary to build housing, community centres, parks, libraries and other social infrastructure essential to our quality of life and that, in turn, drives our economy.
To encourage smaller local firms, procurement processes should be amended to remove excessive burdens, including unnecessarily high insurance requirements and restrictive legal barriers that unfairly discriminate against local firms. Basic things like unfair payment terms make it difficult for small businesses to participate in the local economy. The cost of qualifying is too high for small businesses to take the risk.
There are many local businesses that would love to be involved in making the city we aspire to be. These are firms that have decades of experience that can be used to address our aging social infrastructure, create innovative public housing and renew our parks and public amenities.
We have a well-acknowledged infrastructure deficit, the proven talent to deliver results and the budgetary means to do so. Any politician looking to leave a lasting generational impact on our city could choose to champion this renewal.
New housing can be created through collaborative housing competitions that focus on community engagement and design quality. Edmonton did this in 2019, attracting talent, creativity and innovative solutions for infill housing on publicly owned land. This paired design excellence with the development industry to create solutions at little or no cost to the city. According to the HART Land Assessment Tool, we have hundreds of parcels of land that we already own. We could make a serious dent in our housing crisis if we wanted to.
A plan was proposed for the ByWard Market without any clear vision for what would replace the Clarence Street parking garage. Innovative and creative design ideas could be proposed through a juried competition, enabling local firms to pitch solutions that address the crumbling garage and broader issues to renew the Market. This can bring back a farmers’ market and support local bricks-and-mortar businesses. This broader design strategy can address the twin crises of health care and homelessness that challenge the Market and, through this, renew tourism and economic vitality in the heart of the city.
We have a largely unused baseball stadium sitting on a large parcel of vacant land near transit and other services; we could move forward with creative solutions that pair design excellence and development solutions to create model sustainable communities. We could partner with the National Capital Commission on its recent call for development proposals on vacant land near South Keys.
We are not short of opportunities.
Some might say we don’t have the money. But that isn’t true. We have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on road widenings and expansions each year, projects that benefit a few commuters for a few minutes every day and then, thanks to induced demand, the traffic actually gets worse.
We need to see investing in design as a key part of our economic success: better public places attract families and improve quality of life, making our city a better place to invest. Better housing options build density and increase the potential for neighbourhood businesses to thrive.
We need to invest in a vision for the city. This current crisis is an excellent opportunity to make that happen. We need our leaders to step up and do what’s needed to help our city thrive, regardless of tariffs and trade wars, by investing locally and making “Our Best Ottawa.”
Toon Dreessen is the president of Architects DCA, an Ottawa-based architecture practice, and past president of the Ontario Association of Architects.
