Canada

Not sure it's illegal but I've never seen it done. Every front end specification I've seen says the contractor must hold their price for 30/60 days and many of them stipulate by what date the contract is expected to be awarded.

If the type of pricing you say was submitted when it wasn't asked for the bid would be tossed for not conforming to the required format. If that type of pricing was asked for you'd have pricing all over the place and you'd probably end up with a shitty contractors who bud extra low and bank on a drawn out approval process getting the job for less than they can actually do it for (and cutting corners like crazy)

The issue is that nobody really expected the approval to be that drawn out.

They needed the government funding approved in order to award the contract and the approval process (which required all bids to be submitted, not just the planned awarded one) unexpectedly took 9 months with the feds. It wasn't a municipal project either, it was a local nonprofit org.

I work a lot with the architect that is overseeing the project and not once did they complain about having to submit extra info to the fed (and I have a pretty solid relationship with them so while not completely professional to complain like that it's the type of thing that would have come up in side conversations in-person when meeting up for other projects)

The government can be efficient and competent if it wants to be.

See, this is the problem with the typical mindsets of people who support the parties that make in into the HoC (and many people who support parties who don't): you can't count on the government (or anyone or any organization for that matter) being benelovent all the time, especially when it doesn't align with their own interests. You need to design a system where benevolence is always a byproduct of acting in one's own interest, and what is described in the comment I replied to isn't it.