The procurement database is composed of six datasets covering four jurisdictions. Sources usually share the same primary components but there are important gaps. This table shows the available date range, tenders, awards and documents per data source.
There are some missing features across the sources:
- Federal Proactive Disclosures have no accompanying tenders or documents.
- Vancouver has no standard awards.
- Victoria has no downloadable documents.
There also are sometimes irreparable conflicts between sources:
- CanadaBuys and BuyAndSell conflict with Proactive Disclosures. See Awards data overlap.
- Vancouver and Victoria conflict with BCBid (see BC)
See also the database homepage, which holds some similar information but does not distinguish between data sources, only jurisdictions.
Federal
The federal government has two public streams of data describing its procurement: delegated contracts routed through PSPC, and blanket disclosures organized by TBS. These two overlap substantially, with most PSPC records having an equivalent in the TBS disclosures. While we hold both sources, loose reporting requirements make the two sources, which are required together to understand federal procurement, impossible to join.
Public Service and Procurement Canada (PSPC)
PSPC is a clearinghouse for federal procurement. It manages the procurement process for buyers across the government and maintains a public platform for those contracts called CanadaBuys.
Created by the Public Works and Government Services Act, it is the default procurement manager for a broad spectrum of goods and services, defined in Section 6. The minister of PSPC, Jean-Yves Duclos, can agree to delegations of this authority with government buyers, allowing them to manage their own procurement within some threshold. For example, the RCMP agreed in 2010 to a delegation that directs all competitive contracts greater than $400,000 to PSPC.
Our PSPC data originates from two sources. The current CanadaBuys platform replaced its predecessor BuyAndSell in August 2022. As part of the migration, PSPC created a historical dataset that brings the old data close to the structure currently used by CanadaBuys. So while data from the two platforms resemble each other, PSPC pre-2022 data has some limitations. In particular, contract Type and any relevant Trade Agreements are often missing but are instead mentioned in the arbitrary contract description. We parse these values out of the description text in many but not all cases.
In both CanadaBuys and BuyAndSell, not all contracts PSPC manages are published. Goods less than $25,000 and services and construction less than $40,000 are “low dollar value procurement,” and are not necessarily published.
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS)
TBS consolidates and publishes a dataset of contract awards from agencies across the federal government. Proactive publication of these contracts is required under the Access to Information Act. Each individual department is responsible for submitting data to TBS that conforms to a consistent schema.
Because of the piecemeal nature of the data, TBS’s recommendations for the meaning and usage of each field do not always align with how the fields are used in practice. TBS states that each individual department is the ultimate authority on its own contracts within the dataset.
The earliest records in the dataset are from 2000, but the vast majority are from 2004 onwards. Departments were required to submit data beginning in calendar year 2017, so records before that date should not be considered comprehensive.
New contract data is published on a quarterly basis.
Awards data overlap
TBS and PSPC both describe federal procurement independently of each other. TBS corrals awards data from all departments every quarter, including awards that PSPC managed on behalf of each buyer. But the same contract, first handed off to PSPC then disclosed later to TBS, does not always resemble itself.
Take, for example, this National Defence contract reported in Canadian dollars by TBS and U.S. dollars by PSPC. TBS says the contract was sole-sourced, while PSPC only says that it used a list of suppliers; TBS provides an end date and better contact information, while PSPC better describes the product sought.
About 20 per cent of PSPC awards have IDs that appear exactly in the TBS data. The above example does not, though the two IDs are clearly siblings. With any difference possible and no reliable ID, this leaves Canadians no way to link a contract between the two sources.
Our solution is imperfect: we hold both sets of awards but they are kept separate. When searching through federal tenders, you are browsing PSPC data. If any of those tenders have awards, you can view them on the solicitation page that holds that tender. When searching through federal awards, you are browsing TBS data; there are no linked tenders, and the equivalent solicitation page holds only information about that award. We use TBS awards over PSPC because there are far more of them, covering more years and more overall volume in each one.
Solicitation Method
Federal solicitation methods are detailed throughout PSPC’s supply manual and briefly defined in the TBS data dictionary.
Methods are either competitive or non-competitive. Competitive contracts accept bids from all or some subset of suppliers. Non-competitive contracts do not, citing certain exceptions, including a “pressing emergency in which delay would be injurious to the public interest,” or when the estimated cost to the buyer is below certain thresholds defined for some goods and services.
There are four competitive options (described here):
- Open bidding: Any supplier can bid in response to an online solicitation.
- Selective tendering: Only some prequalified suppliers can bid.
- Limited tendering: Deviation from requirements of the relevant trade agreements (see Trade Agreements), still allowing bids.
- Traditional: Many suppliers can bid but not in response to a public, online solicitation; for example, responding to an email sent to suppliers by the government.
There are two non-competitive options:
- Advanced Contract Award Notice: Notice to suppliers that the buyer intends to award a contract to a pre-identified supplier, while accepting a Statement of Capabilities, not a bid, from challenging suppliers.
- Non-competitive: Blanket category for all other non-competitive processes.
Products
Federal tenders and awards have product codes that describe the goods or services covered by the contract.
PSPC
PSPC records are tagged with United Nations Standard Products and Services Codes (UNSPSC) and their descriptions. Each record may have multiple tags.
For example, a tender for furniture could have the product codes 56100000 (accommodation furniture) and 56101700 (office furniture).
TBS
TBS awards contain a single product code, which may be UNSPSC or Goods and Services Identification Numbers, a separate standard used by the Canadian government until 2021. Product codes will be linked to their descriptions in a future version of the database.
Documents
TBS data does not have documents since it only includes awards. The PSPC Supply Manual lists a series of document templates buyers should add to their tenders; while the templates themselves are held on the private GCPedia resource, filled versions of each should appear throughout the PSPC data.
Miscellaneous
In the PSPC tenders and awards, end user organization is not always present. When it is missing, the end user organization is assumed to be the same as the contracting organization.
British Columbia
B.C. publishes provincial procurement and some municipal procurement data on the BCBid platform. The Core Policy and Procedures Manual requires that BCBid hold all provincial solicitations valued above $10,000 for goods, $75,000 for services and $100,000 for construction. Solicitations otherwise won’t appear on BCBid if they follow a Supply Arrangement, if they apply only to a list of pre-approved suppliers, or if the contract is otherwise non-competitive. A contract can be non-competitive if there is only one capable supplier or an open bidding process would be a security risk.
Like the federal government, multiple departments manage B.C.’s procurement process. Deputy Ministers handle procurement for their ministry. The Office of the Comptroller General sets rules on the procurement process. A division of the Ministry of Citizens’ Services manages procurement for larger contracts, for instance, for a good valued more than $10,000 or service for more than $250,000.
BCBid also covers some procurement for dozens of different regional groups such as Kitimat-Stikine or Comox Valley. These include Vancouver and Victoria, in which case they will duplicate with the versions of the solicitation posted by the municipal platform. The municipal versions of these records can be more detailed than their cross-listings on BCBid. We don’t eliminate Vancouver and Victoria records from BCBid because some exist on that platform, which don’t exist on the municipal platforms.
At the time of writing, there are fewer than 1,000 municipal tenders between Vancouver and Victoria, compared to more than 100,000 overall in B.C.
Amendments
B.C. data does not include award amendment history and will only display the most recent available version of an award.
Miscellaneous
In B.C. awards, only the contracting organization is available.
B.C. offers this list of templates for procurement documents, which should appear throughout B.C. tenders.
Vancouver
Vancouver maintains the Supplier Portal for its procurement. Vancouver data is very limited. What is publicly available is held almost entirely in unstructured PDFs and is available only to registered suppliers using the third-party software powering the site.
What we can regularly parse from this source constitutes only a tender, not an award, even if one exists. Awards are written in sentences on the first page of each document.
Vancouver also sometimes cross-lists its solicitations on the BCBid platform. These are duplicate because they describe the same contract, but can differ from each other in any way, making them sometimes impossible to identify. We include both sources because some records which exist on the municipal platform don’t exist on BCBid, and vice versa.
Victoria
Victoria maintains the Public Purchasing Portal for its procurement. Like Vancouver, it is powered by a third-party software platform, but more data is available, including awards.
Like Vancouver, Victoria sometimes cross-lists its solicitations on the BCBid platform. These duplicates cannot be fixed. More than Vancouver, the Victoria records are sometimes more detailed on the municipal platform than on BCBid. We include both sources because some records which exist on the municipal platform don’t exist on BCBid, and vice versa.
Whereas Vancouver data is almost only in documents, Victoria data includes documents but limits their availability to registered suppliers.