The Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) maintains a stack of web-related policy instruments that govern Government of Canada digital. Vendors selling to the federal government need a working reference — not the 80-page policy PDFs.
**Policy on Service and Digital** — the umbrella policy. Sets the expectation that GoC services and information are accessible, secure, multilingual, and well-designed.
**Directive on Service and Digital** — the implementation directive that operationalizes the policy. Section 4.4 covers web channels.
**Standard on Web Accessibility (SWA)** — WCAG 2.0 AA conformance for GoC web content.
**Standard on Optimizing Websites and Applications for Mobile Devices** — responsive web is the federal default.
**Standard on Web Usability** — usability principles for GoC web.
**Standard on Web Interoperability** — RSS, structured data, and machine-readable formats.
**Communications Policy of the Government of Canada** — plain-language and visual-identity expectations.
**Policy on Communications and Federal Identity** + **Federal Identity Program manual** — the FIP signature, wordmark, and visual-identity rules.
Vendors don't need to memorize these. We do. What vendors need is a corporate site that doesn't actively contradict the standards your buyer enforces internally.
Your corporate site is not a GoC site — TBS standards don't directly bind you. But the same procurement officer who enforces the standards on internal projects is also reviewing your corporate site during RFP evaluation. Two operational implications:
1. **Your site shouldn't ship anything obviously non-conformant.** No images of text, no PDF-only content, no English-only material on bilingual files.
2. **Your team page and capability statement should signal you understand the stack.** Mention SWA, OLA bilingual posture, and FIP awareness in your past-performance descriptions where applicable.
TBS publishes the active instruments at canada.ca/tbs/policies. The Policy on Service and Digital is the current umbrella; older instruments (Policy on Communications, Standard on Web Usability, etc.) are still in force unless explicitly rescinded.
Most Crown corporations are not bound by TBS policies — they have their own boards. But many adopt TBS standards by reference, and the practical accessibility/bilingual expectations are very similar.