Bureaucracy makes it too difficult for tech companies to sell to Ottawa: report

Bureaucracy makes it too difficult for Canadian tech companies to sell to government, a new report from an industry group released Wednesday says.

Bureaucracy makes it too difficult for Canadian tech companies to sell to government, a new report from an industry group says — and all that red tape is keeping them from a bigger piece of the billions spent on procurement.

In some cases, companies find it easier to sell to foreign governments, says Laurent Carbonneau, director of policy and research at the Council of Canadian Innovators, which represents the Canadian tech sector.

Companies want to “sell a good product at a fair price to the government, and they find that it’s very, very hard to do that because there are lots of institutional barriers that prevent them,” he said in an interview.

Carbonneau said he’s spoken to companies in the cybersecurity and health tech space who are able to sell to other countries “without too much trouble.”

“In fact, they do so enthusiastically and they wish they could sell in Canada, but their own governments make it very hard for them to do so.”

In the cybersecurity sector, Canadian companies sell three times as much to other countries as they do to Canadian public-sector clients, says the report co-authored by Carbonneau.

The report, released Wednesday, says procurement from various levels of government amounts to nearly 15 per cent of Canada’s GDP.

The federal process has led to scandals such as the Phoenix pay system debacle, and is not serving the government’s own purposes, it said, citing a report by the auditor general that said a third of “mission-critical government digital applications” were in poor health.