Joint Venture Bidding

A joint venture is an association of two or more parties who combine their money, property, knowledge, expertise or other resources in a single joint business enterprise — sometimes called a consortium — to bid together on a requirement. In federal procurement, bidding as a JV triggers specific disclosure, signature and liability rules set out in Canada's standard bid solicitation instructions.

The federal rules for a JV bid

Canada's standard instructions (clause 2.1.13 of the federal RFP template) require bidders who bid as a joint venture to indicate clearly that it is a joint venture and to provide: the name of each member; the Procurement Business Number (PBN) of each member; the name of the representative — the member chosen by the others to act on their behalf, if applicable; and the name of the joint venture, if applicable. If the information is not clearly provided in the bid, the bidder must supply it on request from the contracting authority. The bid and any resulting contract must be signed by all members of the joint venture, unless one member has been appointed to act on behalf of all members.

Joint and several liability

The rule that matters most: if a contract is awarded to a joint venture, all members are jointly and severally or solidarily liable for the performance of the resulting contract. There is no hiding behind the consortium — the buyer can pursue any member for the whole obligation. Related rules in the standard instructions: each member of a JV must itself meet the security requirements where they apply, the financial information required by the contracting authority must be provided by each member, and members cannot pool their abilities to satisfy a single technical criterion.

Multiple bids and scrutiny

Canada reserves the right to apply additional scrutiny when it receives multiple bids in response to a solicitation from a single bidder or a joint venture, and may reject any or all of those bids if including them would prejudice the integrity and fairness of the process or distort the evaluation. Coordinating members of one JV bidding separately alongside it is therefore a real responsiveness risk.

Common questions

Do JV members share experience and qualifications?

Limited. A joint venture with existing experience as that JV may cite the experience it obtained as that JV, but members cannot pool their individual abilities to meet a single technical criterion — structure your team around each criterion a single member satisfies on its own.

Who registers with the government?

Each member. The instructions require the PBN of each member of the joint venture, not a single registration for the consortium.

Related definitions

PBN (Procurement Business Number) · Industrial security clearance · Two-envelope vs BAFO evaluation