Bidding on Quebec public tenders from Ontario

Ontario companies win Quebec public contracts every month. What stops most of the others is not the competition — it is that almost nothing about the process announces itself in a portal or a language they already use.

This is a map of what actually differs. Every rule below links to the authority that publishes it, and several of the figures are indexed on a fixed schedule, so check the link before you file anything.

One system publishes everything, and it is not a portal you know

Quebec public bodies publish their tender notices in the Système électronique d'appel d'offres, known as SEAO. It is the single public window on the market: notices, the documents behind them, and every addendum that modifies them.

That last part is a rule rather than a convention. For construction contracts the regulation states that tender documents, and any addendum modifying them, may be obtained only through that system — section 9.1 of the Règlement sur les contrats de travaux de construction des organismes publics. A set of drawings emailed to you by a friendly project manager is not the file the bid will be judged against.

Eligibility: an establishment, or an agreement

This is the sentence that decides whether you may bid at all. Section 6 of the same regulation lists the admissibility conditions, and the second one reads:

avoir au Québec ou dans un territoire visé par un accord intergouvernemental applicable, un établissement où il exerce ses activités de façon permanente, clairement identifié à son nom et accessible durant les heures normales de bureau

In English: the bidder must have an establishment where it carries on business permanently, clearly identified in its own name and open during normal business hours — either in Quebec, or in a territory covered by an applicable intergovernmental agreement.

Ontario is such a territory, under two agreements at once: the Accord de commerce et de coopération entre le Québec et l'Ontario and the Accord de libre-échange canadien. So an Ontario establishment satisfies the condition — but only on contracts large enough for one of those agreements to apply. Below the threshold, no agreement is engaged, and a public body may lawfully require an establishment in Quebec.

Everything else in this article is administrative. That paragraph is the market access question, and it turns entirely on the number in the next section.

The thresholds, as they stand on 1 January 2026

These are the amounts at or above which a contract must be opened to suppliers from outside Quebec. They come from the Secrétariat du Conseil du trésor's summary of application thresholds, dated 1 January 2026.

Government departments and budget-funded bodies, under CFTA and the Quebec–Ontario agreement alike:

• supplies: 34,7 k$
• services: 139,0 k$
• construction: 139,0 k$

Education, health and social services: supplies and services at 139,0 k$; construction at 347,4 k$ under CFTA, but 139,0 k$ under the Quebec–Ontario agreement — the bilateral agreement opens those contracts earlier than the national one does.

Government enterprises of an industrial or commercial nature, and public utilities: 694,7 k$ for supplies and services, 6 943 900 $ for construction.

For municipal bodies, the threshold obliging an open procedure is 139 000 $, in effect from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2027.

Two things about these numbers matter more than the numbers themselves. They are indexed every two years for inflation, so a figure you memorised in 2024 is wrong now. And the notice itself has to tell you: section 4 of the regulation requires every public tender notice to state whether an intergovernmental agreement applies. You do not have to work it out — you have to read the field.

What you need before you can bid

The Quebec government publishes its own checklist of requirements. The ones that catch out-of-province bidders:

1. An attestation from Revenu Québec, required for contracts of 25 000 $ and more. It confirms you have filed what Quebec tax law requires of you and owe nothing. It expires — plan for it rather than requesting it the week the bid closes.
2. An authorization to contract from the Autorité des marchés publics, required at 1 M$ and above for services and 5 M$ and above for construction or public-private partnership contracts. This one is not a form; it is a review of your company's integrity, and it takes time.
3. Proof of compliance with the Charte de la langue française, where you employ 25 or more people in Quebec over a six-month period. The accepted documents are an OQLF registration attestation, a receipt for a filed linguistic analysis, an attestation of an approved francization programme, or a francization certificate.
4. Not being listed in the RENA, the register of enterprises ineligible for public contracts.

There are also a lobbying declaration filed with every bid, and an employment equity form for larger companies and larger supply or service bids.

If the work is construction, the RBQ licence comes first

A licence from the Régie du bâtiment du Québec is required of anyone who carries out construction work in Quebec or who submits a bid to do so. Submitting is itself the regulated act, so this is not something to sort out after an award.

There is a Quebec–Ontario agreement here too, and it is narrower than it is often described. It exempts an Ontario contractor from the knowledge examinations in project management, site safety management and administration — on proof of at least three years' registration with the Tarion Warranty Corporation, or five years' registration as a building contractor in Ontario, plus a contract or invoice for each of the past five years in every subclass applied for. The RBQ sets out the conditions.

What it does not do is remove the licence requirement. You still need the licence; the agreement shortens the path to it.

The contract will be in French

Section 21 of the Charte de la langue française provides that contracts entered into by the Administration are drawn up exclusively in the official language. This is not a formality that gets waived for an out-of-province supplier — it is the language the obligations you are signing are written in, which is a good reason to have them read by someone who works in it.

Registering the company

A legal person not constituted in Quebec that carries on an activity in Quebec must register with the Registraire des entreprises within 60 days of starting that activity, and is assigned a numéro d'entreprise du Québec (NEQ). The Registraire states the rule and the deadline.

The calendar to plan against

For construction contracts, the regulation fixes the shape of the schedule:

• the period for receiving bids may not be shorter than 15 days from the day the notice is published;
• an addendum that may affect prices must be issued at least 7 days before the closing date, failing which the closing date must be pushed back far enough to restore those 7 days;
• any change made 3 days or less before closing pushes the date back by at least 3 days;
• the deadline for filing a complaint about the tender documents is set at half the bid period, never less than 10 days, and must fall at least 4 working days before closing.

Fifteen days is the floor, not the norm — but it tells you what a bad week looks like. If you are watching Quebec from Toronto and checking SEAO on Mondays, a notice published on a Tuesday with a 15-day period is a bid you found with a week gone.

What the market looks like once you are eligible

Broadly: less crowded than the equivalent Ontario market, and unevenly so by region and by sector. We publish a report for each of the seventeen administrative regions — how many contracts open there, which bodies publish them, what gets tendered, and how many competitors to expect — built entirely from published notices. The open notices are listed without an account.

If you read only one other thing, make it the piece on how many bidders an open tender actually attracts — it is in French, and it corrects the statistic most often quoted about this market.

Verified on 22 August 2026

Every figure above was read from its source on that date. The threshold table runs to 31 December 2027; the AMP authorization thresholds, the Revenu Québec attestation threshold and the licensing rules have no fixed expiry and can change at any time. This describes how the process works — it is not legal advice, and none of it replaces reading the tender documents themselves.