Procurement policy in Canada: Evolution and impacts---domestic policy, trade, and information technology

This dissertation explores Canadian procurement policy and seeks to account for its evolution through three time periods, coinciding with the rise of regional-industrial policy, the growing trade agenda, and information technology.; Recent events underscore the volatile nature of procurement policy. Procurement policy and the institutions of procurement suffer from a lack of legitimacy in the eyes of the public and even from within government itself, due to the association of spending and contracting with corruption and constant 'bending of the rules.' Contracting is the vehicle by which procurement policy is implemented. In a public policy perspective, the political, economic, legal, and social aspects of why and how government is purchasing goods and services are critical to understand.; Empirically this research covers three overlapping periods of the evolution of procurement policy, the broad post World War II period to about 1990, the 1980s-1990s trade policy period, and the 1990s to the present. Three chapters tell the empirical story. Chapter Three examines the larger multiple policy purposes of procurement before the trade and information technology variables took hold, which are subsequently analyzed in chapters Four and Five.; The study argues that the focus of procurement has shifted from an interventionist orientation to a free-market perspective, and secondly that procurement is a multipurpose tool of government over which the government has increasingly less discretion. These arguments are explored conceptually by drawing the empirical results through a neo-institutional framework, integrating historical, economic, and organizational institutionalism. Neo-institutional theory helps to account for why institutions, both formal and informal, form the parameters through which change and evolution of policy occurs.; This thesis contributes to public policy literature by examining an important subject area in which there is little published. It illuminates the dynamics of procurement policy over three time periods. This thesis extends the use of neo-institutional theory in a useful way to help account for change as well as continuity in public policy. Finally, it demonstrates to the academic and general policy community that procurement is indeed a policy field requiring more attention and deeper understanding.