Trade Agreement: Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA)
Tendering Procedures: The bidder must supply Canadian goods and/or services
Competitive Procurement Strategy: Best Overall Proposal
Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement: No
Nature of Requirements:
Service Canada programs, the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and Old Age Security (OAS), are legislated to provide tax forms to clients for payments received during the previous year ending December 31. The forms are to be received by all clients no later than February 28 of the following calendar year. Service Canada requires data processing, variable printing, supply of printed envelopes, supply of printed information inserts and distribution of these forms. It is estimated that 13,625,000 forms will be mailed in January-February 2022 to more than 9,000,000 program beneficiaries for the 2021 tax year.
The Contract will be in effect from the date of award of Contract until March 31, 2022 with the irrevocable option to extend the Contract by four (4) additional one (1) year periods.
There are security requirements associated with this requirement. For additional information, consult Part 6 - Security, and Part 7 - Resulting Contract Clauses. For more information on personnel and organization security screening or security clauses, Bidders should refer to the Industrial Security Program (ISP) of Public Works and Government Services Canada (http://ssi-iss.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/index-eng.html) website.
This requirement is covered by the Canada Free Trade Agreement (CFTA).
The requirement is limited to Canadian services.
Bidders must use the epost Connect service provided by Canada Post Corporation to transmit their bid electronically. Bidders must refer to Part 2 entitled Bidder Instructions, and Part 3 entitled Bid Preparation Instructions, of the bid solicitation, for further information.
The Annexes will be attached separately.
4.2. Basis of Selection - Lowest price per point
1. To be declared responsive, a bid must:
a. comply with all the requirements of the bid solicitation;
b. meet all mandatory technical evaluation criteria; and
c. obtain the required minimum of 75 percent overall of the points for the technical evaluation criteria which are subject to point rating. The rating is performed on a scale of 452 points.
2. Bids not meeting (a) or (b) or (c) will be declared non-responsive. Neither the responsive bid that receives the highest number of points nor the one that proposed the lowest price will necessarily be accepted. The responsive bid with the lowest evaluated price per point will be recommended for award of contract.
M.1 CORPORATE EXPERIENCE
The Bidder must demonstrate that it has been contractually bound to an external client or to external clients (outside of the Bidder's own company) for two (2) contracts to provide the services described in the Statement of Work.
These two (2) contracts must have started or complete within the last four (4) years prior to the closing of this RFP.
When combined, these two (2) contracts must, at a minimum, include all of the following services (M.1.a - M.1.e):
M.1.a Preparation of large data sets for mailing including sortation for incentive lettermail presort and matching of multiple variable items;
M.1.b Printing of multiple outputs with each output having multiple forms requiring printing of variable information;
M.1.c Mailing preparation with sortation and handling in accordance with Canada Post (CPC) requirements for incentive lettermail presort, matching and insertion of variable print items, selective insertion of multiple additional inserts and delivery to CPC;
M.1.d Supply of printed envelopes for mailing;
M.1.e Storage of material for mailing in addition to the variably printed forms, including material produced or supplied in advance of the printing and mailing activities.
M.2 PRODUCTION CAPABILITY
The Bidder must:
- Provide a written confirmation that they can receive files via FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
- Provide a written confirmation that they have an FTP client to be able to connect into the ESDC network. It may also be necessary to have the ability to install/use ESDC’s designated tunneling software (ie. Appgate),
- Provide a written confirmation that they can read files in AFP (Extensible Markup Language) (for CPP) and flat file (multiple line) format (for OAS and IA).
M.3 PRODUCTION CAPABILITY
The Bidder must demonstrate its capability to complete the data processing, variable printing and mailing of the Service Canada T4 forms within a five (5) week period as per the delivery schedule in Annex 22.
The information provided for M.3 will also be used as part of the rated requirements evaluation (R1).
Delivery Date: Above-mentioned
The Crown retains the right to negotiate with suppliers on any procurement.
Documents may be submitted in either official language of Canada.
