Vanguard Magazine

i t has been hard to ignore what is happening in the United States right now, as Trudeau senior once said, it is "the el- ephant sleeping next to us, a small Canadian flea, that feels everything." Furthermore, now the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) renegotiations are starting with comments in the media every day, including threats from President Trump to cancel it all together. The Trump administration released their list of specific goals for a new NAFTA on July 17th and "Government procurement" made the list. As Vanguard readers all know, government pro- curement is very, very complicated and industry executives try- ing to sell their solutions quickly, whether they like it or not, become experts in government, politics, and policy if they want to be successful. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland's position on the matter was that "government contracts are political junk food - superficially ap- petizing, but unhealthy in the long run." That may be, but if it is coming up in these negotiations, we must ensure we get our fair share. The US Government is by far the largest government customer in the world, buying over half a trillion Canadian dollars; and they make almost all of their purchases locally. Of that, defence (or "defense" in the US) is the largest discriminatory portion of that budget. For the most part, the "elephant sleeping next to us" has fig- ured out how to drive long-term social and economic gains, particularly driving technology investments in their own country through the spending that needs to be made anyways. Even beyond just Government spending, when the US Government has to approve something, they point to "what is the jobs impact to our country." On the day of writing this article, the last day of August, the US Government came out strongly against imposing duties on the Bombardier C Series, clearly a Canadian aerospace "star child", because Bombardier had communicated the powerful, positive economic impacts to the US from the C Series supply chain. When we get down to the details of what company, con- tract or sector will be highlighted, jobs and local impact to that country will matter, and technology and big data analytics will play a role in communicating those impacts. If we go back, the defence sector happened to be the first industry to achieve a form of free trade between Canada and the US with the Defence Industry Productivity Sharing Agreement of 1956. This agreement, in theory, gave Canadian industry duty-free access to the US market, and exemption from the punishing 1933 Buy America Act that restricted US Federal govern- ment procurement to American compa- nies. Since then, we all know the story - free trade has expanded dramatically, to, what we now know, the benefit of both countries. We adopted the Autopact in 1965, the Free Trade Agreement in 1988, and finally NAFTA in 1994. re-negotiations 38 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017 www.vanguardcanada.com T TECHNOLOGY WaTCH by Nicole Verkindt Even beyond just Government spending, when the US Government has to approve something, they point to "what is the jobs impact to our country.

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