The reason I think every department needs an internal tech team is precisely because "just throwing tech" doesn't work. We need bespoke tailored solutions to the specific problems that workers are dealing with.

Now if we add government tech procurement standards - I see no hope in tech at all as surely winner of any contract will deliver past due date, over budget and with missing features.

This is exactly the problem having internal teams building internal tools solves. You're not stuck waiting to go from 0 to 100% on an expensive project with long runway and out of date standards until finally the consultants to toss a solutoin over the fence and leave because they want to get the minimum done and move on to their next paycheque.

You can only do tech really well by understanding the domain and problem, and the people working on it.

I definitely think we should be going big on both OSS and Canadian owned tech. I don't expect the government to build Office, they should be using (and ideally contributing to) OSS. On the other hand, Statistics Canada has a ton of open sourced code that might as well be closed source, and would probably help them move quicker.