Breaking All the Rules: Information Technology Procurement in the Government of Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Government of Canada has recently faced intense parliamentary and public scrutiny of the role played by private contractors in its information technology (IT) projects, most notably in the case of the ArriveCAN application. With these ongoing investigations as its backdrop, this article analyzes patterns in federal government IT procurement between 2017 and 2022, drawing on a comprehensive analysis of the federal contracting open dataset. We reveal that the federal government betrays accepted best practice in modern government IT procurement on several key dimensions, including on contract values and lengths; on the diversity of suppliers; on the source of IT expertise; and in the management of intellectual property. We argue that the Canadian approach to IT procurement is an historically overlooked but crucial driver of its failing digital reform efforts. We conclude by turning to IT procurement policy reforms gaining traction outside Canada that may help the Government of Canada improve how it buys and deploys IT going forward—a task we argue is essential if the government wants to avoid future IT contracting scandals and deliver on its long‐standing promise of digital era modernization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it