The Accessibility for Manitobans Act: How it Advances Sustainable Procurement

Public sectors throughout the world spend billions on goods and services. For well over a decade now, public authorities including us Manitobans have been practicing sustainable procurement and using our spending power to achieve wider global and community benefits: social, environmental and economic.

For many of us, the social criteria we often select to evaluate a product or service has been “the ethical supply chain” and the requisite to purchase items meeting core labour standards and fair working conditions.  The Accessibility for Manitobans Act (AMA) helps to expand our definition of social. It embraces the protection of human diversity and the need to incorporate accessibility considerations when procuring goods, services or facilities.

Given the clear interface between the AMA, sustainable procurement and public sector purchasing, the Sustainable Procurement in Manitoba (SPM) Working Group will begin to incorporate accessibility requirements into the SPM website. We will be reviewing the standards and where applicable provide content and recommend criteria to support the principles of accessibility laid out in legislation.

In the meantime, if you or any of your procurement colleagues have been incorporating accessibility specifications into bid documents and would like to share with the working group please contact us!  It would be very much appreciated.  We will use your specifications to assist with website updating. 

If you would like to learn more about the Accessibility for Manitobans Act, click here.

This article is available in alternate formats upon request.