To the Government of Canada - Buy Canadian

Day 747, 23:45 • Published in Canada New Zealand • by SledDog

Governments buy a lot of stuff. Our government manufactures a lot of stuff of course for purposes of maintaining a supply in emergencies and to service the needs of new players, both in terms of goods they need and in providing them with jobs if necessary. However there are also a lot of outside purchases made so that government reserves aren't drawn on. These outside purchases are necessary and help to put money into the economy. There is nothing wrong with this... so long as the money is going into our economy.

We have little to worry about when it comes to government purchases of raw materials. Ministry of Industries maintains a Q2 Iron company in Spain and a Q2 Lumber company in Ontario to provide raw materials to the Arms and Construction industries. As far as I can tell the government doe not operate companies supplying grain, diamonds or oil, but suppliers in those sectors are almost entirely Canadian dominated.

Where a potential problem exists is in manufactured goods. I can speak with some authority about the Moving Ticket industry, and despite the recent increase in the Import Tax there are still some foreign companies offering the lowest price in the market. This repeatedly happens from a Latvian company called Propeller Air, and on Sunday afternoon there was an offer of 26 tickets at $6.92 from Monaghan Air, an Estonian based company. I don't object to this because the fact is that Monaghan's current offer is in the ball park for offers in the industry and we've seen much lower prices in the past few days from Canadian companies. I don't have any problem with individuals buying from non-Canadian companies. What I have a problem with is with the government buying from non-Canadian companies based exclusively on the lowest price. And yet, as far as I can tell - and remember that I was in Congress for three terms - there is no law, rule order or policy that mandates that when the government purchases something they should give preference to Canadian companies if the price is competitive.

The definition of Canadian has to go beyond the company being based in a Canadian region. Companies may be based in a Canadian region but owned by foreign Organizations. One notable example in the Moving Ticket industry was a company called Sundizno Moving. It was based in Nunavut and on November 18th made an offering of 176 Q1 tickets at $5.85. this price had dropped by 10 a.m. on November 20th to $5.59, by which time the company had 94 tickets left. by 2 p.m. on the same day the remaining 94 tickets had been sold.

And now as they say, The rest of the story. Sundizno Moving had no employees at the time of this sale. It had licenses for Canada and Hungary, and a very quick check found that the company was owned by a Hungarian organization. Sundizno Moving was a left over from the Hungarian occupation of Nunavut, so that the purchasers of those tickets were doing absolutely nothing for the Canadian economy when they bought them. No Canadian labour was employed in manufacturing those tickets; the income tax generated by the people who made those tickets had gone to the Hungarian government not to the Canadian government; because the company was nominally Canadian, no Import Tax was paid to the Canadian government; and if the owners of the Hungarian group were dumb enough to have to pay taxes on their profits when transferring it from the company to the organization it went into the pockets of the Hungarian government. An the most likely people to buy 94 Moving Tickets in a four hour period? The Government of Canada.

What I would like to see proposed in Congress is either or a rule or a piece of legislation which states that when the Government of Canada is purchasing anything on the open market - i.e. from privately owned vendors rather than from government companies - preference be given to Canadian companies owned by Canadian organizations, provided that the difference in price between the goods provided by the lower priced foreign controlled company and the Canadian company is no more than a specified percentage (probably somewhere between 1% and 2.5% - we don't want to get too extreme here) of the price of the lower priced goods. This would not only help stimulate the Canadian economy, but might just keep us from funding an enemy.