It's Your Turn
Current Consultations
FTAA - Consultations on Government Procurement Market Access Negotiations
Background Information
Improving Canadian Access to Hemispheric Government Procurement Markets
The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) will be the outcome of a plan to create the world's largest free trade area including the countries of South America, Central America, the Carribean1, and North America (i.e. the Western hemisphere). The region has a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of about $19.7 trillion, more than one third of the world's economic activity, and approximately one sixth of the world's population. Canada's goal is to expand growth and opportunities for Canadians in practical ways, such as obtaining greater access for Canadian suppliers to the extensive purchases of our hemisphere's governments. The FTAA has a target completion date of 2005.
Negotiations for the FTAA were officially launched at the second Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile in 1998 . Nine negotiating groups were established as follows; government procurement, market access, investment, services, dispute settlement, agriculture, intellectual property rights, competition policy, and subsidies, anti-dumping and countervailing duties.
Canada's objective in the government procurement negotiating group is to achieve improved access to the Western hemisphere's procurement markets by providing you with ‘non-discriminatory' access to them. That is to say, for a particular country we will endeavour to provide you with a level playing field relative to both local suppliers and other suppliers from the hemisphere. The OECD estimates that, for non-OECD countries, government purchases account for fully 5.10% of GDP. If this is applied to the FTAA countries it equates to a very large government procurement market of about $985 billion (N.B. the FTAA includes three OECD countries and, on average across the OECD, procurement actually represents a higher percentage of GDP).
Depending on your input and that of other domestic stakeholders, Canada will push for you to have non-discriminatory access to purchases made by government departments, agencies and state owned/invested enterprises (hereafter referred to as government organisations) in our hemisphere. Canada will seek access to ‘traditional' government purchases of goods, services and construction services made through standard contracts, leases and other contractual arrangements. Canada may also seek access to ‘non-traditional' purchases where a portion of the supplier's revenue does not come from the government (e.g. contracts where earnings are generated by user fees). Such purchases are often referred to as concessions or Build Operate Transfer (BOT) contracts.
Canada will try to achieve these goals through:
general requirements obliging government organisations to treat hemispheric suppliers at least as well as domestic ones; treaty obligations prohibiting the conditioning of contract awards on commitments to assist local development; and provisions requiring open, transparent and fair tendering procedures that contain review and appeal mechanisms.
The FTAA government procurement chapter will likely have a national security exception similar to that found in existing international trade agreements' government procurement chapters. As well, there will likely be a dollar value threshold below which the trade agreement will not apply.
Before June 15, 2003 Canada must submit its requests to other countries for improved access to their government procurement market. After July 15, Canada will begin to provide new offers for improved access to the Canadian government procurement market. These requests and offers must specify the particular government organisations, services and goods which Canada wishes to have included or excluded for each country.
Our goal is to ensure your voice is heard. We would, therefore, appreciate any responses to the questions you may wish to provide. Their purpose is to provide guidance to Canadian FTAA government procurement negotiators as they create Canada's requests and offers.
Any information that you provide will be treated in accordance with the provisions of the Access to Information Act. Although, we cannot guarantee confidentiality, please be assured that commercially sensitive information is protected under the provisions of section 20 of the Act. Any information collected by Industry Canada which would qualify for protection under this section, will be treated in a confidential manner. Should any personal information be collected it will be treated in accordance with the provisions of the Privacy Act.
For more information on the FTAA, including Canada's current government procurement positions, visit the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade website at: http://www.ftaa.gc.ca.
Thank you for your participation in this consultation initiative. Your response will provide important guidance to Canada's negotiators and we look forward to receiving it.
1 Cuba is excluded from the FTAA.
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