In the wake of a series of scandals that have raised serious questions about how the Canadian government contracts with private companies, the Investigative Journalism Foundation is launching a new public interest database meant to shed light on that process.
The IJF’s procurement database debuts today, giving the public access to a trove of information on how government contracts are awarded. The searchable records currently include more than 177,000 government tenders and 948,000 awards.
"The procurement database will help Canadians find corruption, waste and mismanagement,” said IJF’s CEO Zane Schwartz. “The fantastic story about SNC-Lavalin we're publishing today, for example, shows just how much money that controversial firm has won since its campaign to avoid a criminal conviction on corruption charges almost brought down Justin Trudeau's government. We will have lots more stories like that coming over the next few weeks."
Procurement
Canadian governments spend billions of taxpayer dollars on contracts every year. The IJF is holding public institutions accountable by tracking where that money goes.
The new database will be the first to make 610,000 documents connected to these contracts machine-readable and searchable, and to consolidate records for hundreds of companies that use a variety of different names to contract with the government. It currently includes records from the federal government and from B.C. It will be updated daily — users can sign up for real-time alerts when a company they’re tracking wins a new award — and will be expanded in the coming months to include information from other jurisdictions.
The launch comes on the heels of a steady stream of revelations about the contract to create the ArriveCan app used by travellers entering Canada.
Earlier this year, a federal ombudsman pointed out serious flaws in a procurement process that “favoured” the winning contractor, and made questionable use of subcontractors. The auditor general also investigated, telling Canadians “we paid too much” for the app and questioning how the cost ballooned to $59.5 million or higher.
Then came a series of bombshell exposés revealing that one of the firms involved in building the app was run by a defence department employee, and it had received more than $200 million in government contracts since 2015.
“Thinking back to some of the biggest government scandals in recent years, there's SNC-Lavalin, WE Charity, Phoenix pay system and ArriveCan. All of those came from looking at contract data and government spending,” IJF reporter Carly Penrose said.
She said the new database cleans up the “messy” data that governments post publicly through a number of different sources, making it easier for regular people and journalists to trace government spending.
As reporter Madison McLauchlan put it, “Reporters can literally follow the money.”
Spelling errors and multi-billion-dollar mistakes
IJF’s director of technology, Daniel Nass, said that his tech team worked together to build the core of the database: a set of real-time systems for ingesting and processing tender and award data.
There were some challenges that came with the process, including compiling more than half a million PDF and Microsoft Word documents containing information about tender opportunities and contextualizing overlapping information from the government’s datasets on contract awards.
The IJF team also held a company-wide standardization and review process which included cleaning and standardizing company names that appeared in the data. This helped account for spelling errors, joint ventures and acquisitions.
“A project of this size can only work if multiple departments cross-collaborate and support one another,” reporter Liv Chug said.
Together, the team created consolidated profiles for 500 companies, accounting for more than three-quarters of all contract dollars awarded by the federal government.
Reporter Anusha Siddiqui said one of the major challenges was determining whether a company’s name had been misspelled on government documents, or if the contract was for a different firm altogether.
“The misspellings were both hilarious and confusing at times,” she said.
That includes Irving Oil misspelled as Orving Oil, and Microsoft written as Micorsoft.
There were some harder-to-catch errors in the government documentation as well. In one particularly glaring instance, the procurement ID number for a contract had been mistakenly entered into the contract value field, so a $1,672 award to supply tools to National Defence appeared as a whopping $4.5-billion contract.
Government transparency 'can be taken away'
Michael Wernick, a former clerk of the Privy Council and Jarislowsky chair in public sector management at the University of Ottawa, said he’s a fan of any project that offers transparency about government decisions.
“The more that’s out there, the more that there can be feedback on governments, whether it comes from journalists or stakeholders or competing firms,” he said. “That's how the state learns and gets better.”
Wernick said a tool like the new database could be used to track whether governments are meeting their own procurement objectives, like contracting with more businesses led by Indigenous people and other diverse groups.
He pointed out that the IJF’s database could also serve as a backstop to government-run websites, in case future governments decide to become more opaque.
“Most of the proactive disclosure practices of the federal government … rest on administrative procedures and policy statements by the government of the day. They've built up over time, but they can be taken away,” Wernick said.
“If we hypothetically had a government that wanted to be far less forthcoming, less transparent, it would be relatively easy for them to dial back and roll back on this kind of transparency.”