The actual contracts and tender solicitations are public. I can't find any mention of a recent contract c6 gpmgs, but perhaps the government will be releasing the tender soon, and this is the governments advanced notice.
The last time the government bought these machine guns was in 2015. You can view the tender specifications, and additional info here.
https://buyandsell.gc.ca/cds/public...1b4c/ABES.PROD.PW__BM.B015.E25188.EBSU000.PDF
In addition to the 100 guns they bought, they also bought 100 spare barrels, 100 cleaning kits, 100 soft cloth ammo bags and 100 manuals. In order to be awarded the contract though, you would have to submit 3 sample firearms for robust testing, which may or may not result in the destruction of those firearms. Just read through the acceptance testing that will be done and try to imagine how much that would cost as the seller, and then you have to amortize those costs over the total number of units purchased. Often times the firearm supplier has to supply the ammo for the test, depending on how DND sets it up. IN addition to submitting your prices for the tender, you often have to submit thousands of pages of technical documentation to substantiate your claims that the gun can do what DND says it must be able to do, and often times that will incur 3rd party testing, at the bidders expense.
So imagine you walk into your local gun shop, and ask to buy a 1000 dollar rifle, but that you want the gun store to hire a gun smith to conduct a complete inspection, including firing 200 rounds to determine the reliability and accuracy of the firearm. Add in 2 decades worth of spare parts and tech support, which usually involves enough spare parts to build a whole bunch of new guns from scratch. Would it still be a 1000 dollar gun?
Without a contract, or even a tender, its hard to say what might drive the cost of these guns up to 27 thousand dollars each, but if they included any kind of electro optic devices that price could go to the moon in a hurry.
But for another example, look at the new ranger rifles. You can go to SAKO and get the civilian version of the custom CTR that they proposed for the ranger rifle, and it will cost less than 3k. DNDs per unit purchase price was over 12k, and that was for the lowest cost compliant solution. But they included a pretty serious hard case, soft case, spare mags, cleaning kit, a sea container full of spare parts, training and a not-your-average lifetime warranty.
DND is a very demanding customer. They ask sellers to jump through all kinds of hoops at their own expense just to respond to a request for proposal, and those are costs that the company has to try to recover in the sale in order to remain profitable and in business. And that's not even including the fact that DND can make you spend millions of dollars preparing a multi thousand page technical proposal, independent testing, submission of samples for destructive testing, and retains the right to not even award a contract to anyone.
WHen people talk about our broken procurement system, this is one of the examples, and at the end of the day our broken procurement system results in delays of getting the equipment to the good lads and lassies that need it, inefficient, unpredictable and unpermissive marketplace for businesses, and ultimately added costs to the tax payers.
