To the Point for the Week of September 13, 2026
To the Point for the Week of September 13, 2026
We go heavy on the government of Ontario ultimatum to municipalities and light on the risks of giving a politician carte blanche to act.
ONTARIO
Buy Ontario, Or Else!
The one thing one can appreciate about President Trump’s tariffs is that they have forced the province and the country to take seriously the need to elevate great Ontario- and Canadian-based companies that, until now, have faced hurdles in competing against foreign firms to sell their services, products, and solutions to their own governments.
“Buy Ontario” became the political rallying call for the public service and municipalities to prioritize Ontario-based suppliers in their procurements and passed the Buy Ontario Act (Public Sector Procurement), 2025. One of the most critical parts of the legislation was the power afforded Management Board of Cabinet to develop the government’s Buy Ontario Procurement Directive it released on April 13, 2026. This would be the government’s signature, broad based requirement to prioritize Ontario and Canadian suppliers and vendors for new provincial and municipal procurements.
The directive was a political layup for the provincial government. Of course, these things come with many unintended consequences and a significant caveat: no one really understands how to use the directive, at either the provincial or municipal level, creating significant policy implementation challenges that simply add more bureaucracy rather than simplifying the process of procuring Ontario and Canadian business offerings. It also brings into focus how, under the threat of further punitive U.S. economic policies directed at Canada, governments rush reactionary policies because they are politically expedient and beneficial without carefully considering how they will be implemented.
The implementation fallout from the province’s Buy Ontario Procurement Directive became evident this week when Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Rob Flack issued a letter to municipal heads of council on September 15, reinforcing the province’s expectation that municipalities comply fully with the government’s directive, saying this expectation is “not optional” and “an absolute must.”
Flack in his letter directs municipal elected officials and department heads to review supply chains, procurement practices, and immediate procurements to replace vendors from outside Canada. He followed up this direction by making it clear a more detailed correspondence outlining the government’s expectations will be sent to municipal CAOs in the coming days. The letter concludes with a clear, direct warning for municipalities: “Failure to comply with Buy Ontario requirements will force us to reconsider provincial funding made available to municipalities, in addition to other consequences under the Buy Ontario Act (Public Sector Procurement), 2025.” The province is not playing around.
Many big-city mayors, including Brampton’s Patrick Brown, Mississauga Mayor Carolyn Parrish, and Pickering’s Kevin Ashe, reacted swiftly, although with hints of defensiveness, with virtually universal support of the province’s directive. They made clear they back the government’s leadership but were careful to note how their municipalities, and many more, took it upon themselves to independently implement their own form of Buy Ontario/Canada where it made fiscal sense and met the needs of the municipality.
Minister Flack’s letter wasn’t issued in a vacuum. Something prompted the government to issue this letter as a forcing function for municipalities. Vendors and suppliers, particularly in construction and infrastructure, many of whom we represent, have raised concerns that provincial ministries and agencies, including Infrastructure Ontario and Metrolinx, as well as municipalities, in their opinion, are not following this directive, resulting in various compliance burdens.
This is where Flack’s letter becomes more of a political document. It issues a demand but fails to acknowledge the additional administrative and bureaucratic burdens hoisted upon municipalities that come with reactionary policy decisions and lacks clarity on the directive’s implementation requirements and objectives.
Riley Brockington, President of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO), noted in the Globe and Mail that the directive layers in more bureaucracy that falls under the responsibility of municipalities to create. Brockington identified a number of material impacts on municipal procurement resulting from the directive, including time added to procurement, complexities resulting from tracing and verifying Ontario/Canadian vendor supply chains, added project timelines due to added procurement requirements, and the challenges of balancing Buy Ontario with ensuring the highest value for money for taxpayers. Again, it’s critical to note that municipalities and their advocacy arm in AMO are not against the directive, but rather their concerns are directed at how the directive lacks uniformity, ease of implementation, and cost-effectiveness.
ONpoint has been instrumental in elevating our clients’ concerns to provincial decision-makers. In addition to Brockington’s points about added layers of bureaucracy, the message we’ve been communicating to government is that the Buy Ontario directive lacks consistent application, benchmarks, and rules. The result has been a hodgepodge of implementation at the municipal level, from simple deference to Ontario’s rules to more targeted procurement bylaws. Consequently, vendors are now saddled with duplicative paperwork, higher compliance costs, tendering uncertainty, and added barriers for Ontario firms.
What our clients, and the broader business-to-government sector, want to see is consistency, clarity, and direction from the province to municipalities. The message is simple: tell municipalities exactly how this directive is to be used and implemented. Leave no room for interpretation.
We have also clearly signalled to government that there is a lack of enforcement beyond vendor attestations to their “Canadianness.” It’s critical that the province develop the tools necessary to enforce Canadian content and supply-chain requirements to ensure bona fide Canadian companies are benefiting and not those who attempt to cloak their operations in the flag without verification. Trust but verify will not fly in this context.
Solving how the supply chain requirements are verified would save every municipality from having to require a vendor to repeatedly prove they meet the above-mentioned requirements, making Buy Ontario procurement easier to administer, creating consistency between municipalities, and reducing compliance burdens for businesses. A pre-qualification could also make it simpler for municipalities to offer alternative procurement pathways, like pilot programs, proofs of concept, or challenge-based procurement, that would avoid lengthy and costly procurements for verified and proven Canadian products, solutions, and services.
Over the long term, the province must create the conditions for Ontario companies to innovate, grow, and compete with foreign suppliers on a level playing field, rather than a blanket requirement to use Canadian companies. The Ontario Chamber of Commerce has long advocated for better economic policies, like a more simplified tax and regulatory environment, that would enable domestic firms to better compete with their foreign counterparts, especially from south of the border. A Buy Ontario policy is only as effective as the pool of Ontario- and Canadian-based suppliers that can supply the broad swath of goods and services required by government. Let’s be clear, we know that there’s no Canadian firm that can supply something like a Microsoft Office suite of software, but at least we will be creating the environment for Ontario firms to fulfill the needs of the province and municipalities in a cost-effective way.
Yes, the government must do everything it can and use every tool in the toolbox to protect against and insulate itself from outside trade shocks. Policy development must be swift in these uncertain economic times, but not so hastily formulated that it requires more heavy lifting after the fact.
FEDERAL
Carte Blanche
Carte blanche is the French term for “blank document,” used to describe full discretionary authority. It affords one permission and cover to act without meaningful limitations. In the political context, it doesn’t mean unlimited power, but it affords a political leader—either formally through legislative authority or informally via political permission—cover to essentially act as they see fit. It is almost always the result of a crisis moment. Providing a leader with carte blanche authority risks fastening a nation to irreversible change that can outlast the crisis that produced it.
In 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln received congressional authority to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act during the October Crisis of 1970, resulting in the arbitrary arrest of hundreds of people and the deployment of armed forces in Quebec to protect federal officials. After 9/11, Congress passed the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), authorizing President George W. Bush to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against nations, organizations and individuals that planned, authorized, committed or aided the attacks, or harboured those who did. Congress later passed the USA PATRIOT Act in October 2001, expanding federal investigative and intelligence powers. These examples were vastly different in circumstance and consequence. But they all had lasting impacts on the balance between executive power and civil rights.
All these historical examples should lead a populace to be very cautious about granting new, almost unlimited, powers to political leaders, especially in the Canadian federal context. They don’t call Canadian parliamentary democracy an “elected dictatorship” for nothing. Obviously, it doesn’t mean prime ministers have unlimited legal power. It means that a majority-government prime minister can convert a broad public mood—particularly acute during a perceived national crisis—into swift action. Because Canada’s system is built on party discipline and confidence, a majority prime minister controls both the executive and the legislature meant to restrain it.
The threat of tariffs—and, more specifically, the perceived direct threat from President Trump—has undoubtedly whipped up public support for a more aggressive response. That public mood is being leveraged to allow the Prime Minister to act in ways that treat a majority Parliament as a simple formality, a rubber stamp, rather than a mechanism of restraint and accountability. That is the risk Canadians face now: giving the government broad political latitude to act in the face of real or perceived threats risks allowing it to treat public scrutiny as an obstacle, while pursuing a wholesale national reorientation at home and abroad.
As Prime Minister Carney travelled to Europe (yet again) this week, a new poll found that an overwhelming number of Canadians support deepening Canada’s relationship with Europe. The Abacus Data poll, conducted between September 4 and 9, found that 80% of Canadians supported deeper strategic cooperation—in matters of defence, economics and foreign policy—with the EU. This is not an unreasonable expectation or desire. The United States has acted in ways that threaten our economic well-being. It is not unreasonable to expect our political leaders to react in ways that protect Canadian economic interests.
The Prime Minister has effectively translated this national mood into a case for a formal relationship with the European Union that includes the title of “associate member.” The problem isn’t giving the Prime Minister authority to deepen ties with the continent from which Canada was built. The problem is how that authority is translated into action and policy. We do not know what “associate member” of the EU even means. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has proposed this new pathway to closer ties with the bloc without defining what it is or what it entails, and yet the Prime Minister appears fully on board and is working through the details.
And therein lies the problem. By providing the Prime Minister with unprecedented political capital to act, the country risks tying itself to a relationship whose costs, obligations and limits Canadians have not yet been told.
Christopher Mourtos, writing on behalf of ONpoint Strategy Group
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