The Cheapest Fee Buys the Most Expensive Building

Nearly every argument against low-fee selection of designers is made by someone who sells design services. That is the argument’s structural weakness, and it is why it keeps losing at the evaluation table. The owner-side version of the case is narrower, colder, and considerably harder to dismiss.

Fee competition for professional services is not a pricing decision. It is a risk-allocation decision, taken early, taken quietly, and taken by people who will not be in the room when the consequences arrive. By the time they do arrive, as change orders, as schedule extensions, as an existing condition nobody investigated, the procurement file is closed and the saving has long since been booked.

The Argument Keeps Losing Because the Wrong Party Makes It

When an architect argues against selection on lowest fee, the evaluator hears advocacy for fees. When an engineer argues it, the evaluator hears the same thing. The argument is correct and it is discounted anyway, because the messenger has an obvious interest in the outcome. Professional associations in Canada have been making this case for decades against modest returns.

The owner’s version does not mention professional compensation at all. It says something the evaluator cannot discount as self-interest: a fee competition purchases a smaller quantity of thinking, and the thinking that gets deleted is precisely the thinking that would have found the expensive surprises while they were still cheap.

What a Fee Competition Actually Buys

No competent firm wins a fee competition by accepting a thinner margin. It wins by proposing fewer hours. That is the only lever on the page with real travel in it.

The hours do not leave the project. They move. Investigation priced out of the design phase reappears as a field discovery during construction, at construction rates, on the critical path, with an idle crew attached to it and no competitive tension left anywhere in the transaction.

On heritage rehabilitation the transfer is steeper still, because the unknown is not a line on a risk register. It is the substance of the building. A masonry assembly, a roof structure or a window system that was never opened up during design is not a saving. It is a deferred invoice with an unknown face value, and the owner has already signed for it.

A fee competition does not lower the cost of the building. It moves the cost from a line the owner can still negotiate to a line the owner can only pay.

The Evidence, and Its Limits

The strongest quantitative work on this is American, and it should be labelled as such. A study by the ACEC Research Institute of federal and state projects found cost growth of roughly 3 percent where qualifications-based selection was used, against a national average nearer 6 percent; schedule growth of roughly 7 percent against 10 percent; and high or very high owner satisfaction on 89 percent of QBS projects.

Canadian work points the same way. The University of Alberta released a study in late 2021 evaluating the benefits of qualifications-based selection, and the Construction and Design Alliance of Ontario published work in 2022 on the return from earlier investment in planning and design.

None of this is a controlled trial, and an owner should say so out loud. Organisations that choose qualifications-based selection may simply be better-governed owners, and the method may be collecting credit that belongs to the discipline behind it. The honest reading is that the evidence is directional and consistent rather than conclusive. That is still a materially better basis for a capital decision than the untested assumption that the lowest fee produces the lowest cost.

Canada Has No Brooks Act. It Has a Patchwork.

The United States settled this in statute. The Brooks Act of 1972 requires federal agencies to select architects and engineers on qualifications, with the fee negotiated after selection, and roughly 47 states have enacted equivalent legislation.

Canada has no federal counterpart. What exists is a patchwork, and an owner working across jurisdictions has to know which rulebook is in the room.

• Québec. The reform of the Règlement sur certains contrats de services des organismes publics, under the Loi sur les contrats des organismes publics, sets out four award methods for architectural and engineering services. One of them is sélection basée sur les compétences: quality evaluated first, price negotiated after. Competence-based selection has been in use for consulting engineering in Québec since 2008.
• Ontario, municipal. The City of Toronto’s Executive Committee considered a staff report in April 2026 moving the city toward qualifications-based selection within its evaluation framework for design services.
• Alberta, municipal. The City of Calgary has run a qualifications-based process for roughly three decades and is cited as the working Canadian model.
• Federal. Procurement is governed by the Financial Administration Act, the Government Contracts Regulations and the Treasury Board Directive on the Management of Procurement, which frames the objective as best value rather than lowest price. There is no qualifications-based mandate. The design of each solicitation decides the outcome.

For a federal or institutional owner in the National Capital Region, that last line is the operative one. Nothing in the framework compels a fee race. Nothing prevents one either. The evaluation grid is a choice, and the owner makes it.

What an Owner Can Do Inside the Rules As They Stand

Pure qualifications-based selection is not available on every file. Most owners are working inside a quality-and-price grid and will continue to. The discipline is still available to them; it simply has to be built into the solicitation before it is issued, because after issue the grid is the law of the file.

The Fiduciary Reading

Procurement is not an administrative step taken ahead of the real work. It is the first and cheapest risk-control decision on a capital project, and the only one taken while every option is still open and nothing has been built.

An owner who awards on the lowest fee has not saved the difference. That owner has purchased less certainty and financed the balance at construction-phase rates. This is a defensible decision when it is taken deliberately, with the exposure understood and priced. It is rarely taken that way. It is usually taken because the evaluation grid was drafted by someone carrying no fiduciary duty to the owner’s balance sheet.

The correction is not a louder argument about fees. It is an owner-side voice in the room on the day the grid is written.