Buy Ontario Act – 2025
Earlier today, Minister Crawford tabled the Buy Ontario Act, a landmark initiative aimed at strengthening support for Ontario and Canadian businesses. The Act focuses on enhancing procurement rules and increasing transparency, ensuring that government purchasing decisions drive local economic growth and foster trust in the process.
The purpose of the Act is two-fold:
- To transform public sector procurement practices on the basis of integrity and value for money while supporting economic development; and,
- Leveraging Public Sector procurement as a means to protect Ontario’s economy and safeguard its supply chains.
The Act allows the Treasury Board to create directives that, among other things, will require public sector entities to give preference to goods and services made by Ontario or Canadian vendors.
Scope Overview:
These rules will apply to government entities including:
- Core Ontario Government
- Municipalities (including boards and commissions like transit commissions)
- School Boards
- Post-Secondary Institutions that receive operating funding from the Ontario Government
- Children’s Aid Societies
- Agencies
- Hospitals
Lastly, a person or entity can be prescribed as a public sector entity through the regulatory authority in this Act.
Our Analysis:
The directive making authority will allow the Ontario government to require that preference be given Ontario or Canadian goods or services.
These requirements could take the form of preferential scoring as part of the procurement process or limiting eligibility to non-Ontario or non-Canadian vendors from participating in procurement processes. These requirements can also be written into contracts to be enforced on third parties working with public sector entities.
There will also be new requirements developed for reporting requirements and enforcement measures which h are intended to give the government and Supply Ontario a greater line of sight into Ontario’s procurement ecosystem.
What does this mean?
The Bill will repeal the Building Ontario Businesses Act, 2022 (BOBI) once the bill passes and new regulations are developed. This means that BOBI will stay in effect until that time, but should the Bill pass, BOBI’s regulations including the government’s current definition of an Ontario business will be repealed and replaced by new regulation under the Buy Ontario Act.
Another key element of the new Bill is the distinction is a new “Prescribed Public Sector Entity” classification which provides the government with the ability to designate an entity “public sector” through regulations. This flexibility means the government can expand its reach to include additional organizations, ensuring consistent procurement standards and transparency across more sectors.
Next Steps
There are several scenarios under which the bill could pass before the Legislature rises for its winter break. Whether the bill is passed or not, the government will likely be developing their new regulatory regime over the winter months.
We will be monitoring the development of regulations and opportunities for stakeholders to provide input.