The IJF procurement database documents government efforts to procure goods and services from suppliers, which are mostly in the private sector. Canadian governments of all levels post solicitations for these products on public platforms that companies themselves use to search for business opportunities. The IJF collects data from each of these platforms and unifies it into a standard format.

Our procurement data include the federal, B.C., Vancouver, and Victoria governments. Its earliest records date back to 2000, and we add more every day. It includes structured data published online or in downloadable form, alongside unstructured files such as PDFs and Word documents.

The procurement database has three core technical advantages for its users:

  1. Unified formats: compare in-kind contracts reported disparately across Canada.
  2. Cleaner data: follow patterns obscured by lax reporting standards.  
  3. Documents indexed: search inside the technical materials not searchable at the source.

This handbook describes the workings of Canadian procurement alongside the improvements, and sacrifices, we have made in creating the database.

Sourcing

The procurement database covers the following jurisdictions: federal, British Columbia, Vancouver and Victoria. This is a sketch of each included data source. For more, see Catalogue of Sources.

Two datasets from different departments comprise federal procurement:

  1. CanadaBuys: a live, online platform maintained by Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC).
  2. Proactive Disclosures: periodic disclosures from across the government, maintained by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS).

PSPC records are much more detailed and made available daily; TBS is far more comprehensive, but each record is slimmer, and the dataset is updated quarterly. Our federal data is a best-effort synthesis of two datasets which left separate are incomplete, but which cannot be consolidated: the TBS and PSPC versions of some contract often don’t resemble each other, and rarely share an identifier.

B.C. data is comprised of the main provincial source and two municipal sources:

  1. BCBid
  2. The Vancouver Supplier Portal
  3. Victoria’s Public Purchasing Portal

All are live, online platforms. B.C. holds many cross-listings from municipal governments, including records separately published by Vancouver and Victoria, creating duplicates that often cannot be identified.