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NLIS 5
February 21, 2006
(Innovation, Trade and Rural Development)
 

Better access to Canadian public sector procurement

(Winnipeg) � MARCAN, the window on procurement in the Canadian public sector, has just been expanded to improve the ability of Canadian business to access necessary information on government procurement opportunities.

MARCAN (www.marcan.net) has been developed to help Canadian companies identify internet sites that may publish tender notices for procurement contracts within the Canadian public sector. The site is an initiative of federal, provincial and territorial governments under the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT). MARCAN has been expanded to let business know the rules for public sector procurement. It identifies the public organizations covered by the rules and specifies the purchase levels at which the rules apply and the process that applies to bid protests. It also provides current procurement contacts and information on doing business with each government.

"This expansion of MARCAN will help Canadian business better tap into the billion dollar public procurement market. This is one of the many initiatives to provide an open, fair and accessible public procurement environment in Canada", states Kathy Dunderdale, Minister of Innovation, Trade and Rural Development of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, as lead minister on procurement for the AIT.

The MARCAN initiative follows a successful meeting of federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for internal trade in June 2005 and the recent introduction of rules, based on the AIT�s principles of transparency, fairness, accessibility and non-discrimination in public procurement, governing billions of dollars of Crown corporation procurement.

Related to this initiative, several governments � Alberta, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Quebec and Saskatchewan � are exchanging the tender notices posted on their sites so that Canadian business can access the notices in one internet location. These notices, as well as notices of the broader public sector that are published on the procurement Web sites of these governments, can now be found on the Alberta Purchasing Connection (APC) (www.purchasingconnection.ca), on se@o (www.seao.ca), the site used by the Quebec Government, and on Nova Scotia�s Government Procurement site (www.gov.ns.ca/tenders). It is anticipated that this capability will expand in the future.

The AIT came into effect July 1, 1995 in order to reduce and eliminate, to the extent possible, barriers to the free movement of persons, goods, services and investments within Canada and to establish an open, efficient and stable domestic market.

Media contact: Anna Maria Magnifico, Executive Director, Internal Trade Secretariat,  (204) 987-8094, amagnifico@ait-aci.ca

2006 02 21                                      10:45 a.m.


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