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Which Canadian tender sources we index

Nine public sources, what each one lets us say, what is missing and why — and what still works on any tender at all, indexed or not.

September 2, 2026

Companies who find us almost always ask the same thing first, and it is the right question: which tenders do you actually work on?

Short answer: nine public sources, four provinces where we see more than federal notices, and coverage that is deliberately uneven. The live version is on the open-tender map, rebuilt every hour.

The long answer is worth an article, because the thing that decides everything is not the province. It is what each source is willing to publish.

What each source publishes

A portal that announces the notices, names the winner and publishes the losing bids supports claims that no other kind of portal can. A portal that names only the winner closes four questions out of five at once. That is the only ranking that matters here, so here it is.

Notices, awards, and every bid that was filed.

SEAO — every public body in Quebec, as open data under a CC-BY licence, with more than twenty years of bidding history behind it. It is the most complete source in the country by a wide margin.
bids&tenders — eighty municipal portals: thirty in Ontario, twenty-six in British Columbia, twenty-four in Alberta. Cities, regions, health authorities, transit agencies. In Ontario alone, 280 open notices and 37,046 awarded ones when we measured on 22 August 2026. Every awarded tender there shows the whole ladder: which firm bid, and how much.
City of Vancouver — no notice feed, but named losing bids with prices across more than sixteen hundred solicitations since 2013.

Notices and awards, winner only.

CanadaBuys — open federal notices, plus 133,504 award notices. Ottawa publishes who won and never who lost.
City of Toronto — the open solicitation feed and awarded contracts back to

2012. Same limit.

Awards only.

City of Ottawa — 17,218 awards from 2016 to 2024.
City of Kitchener — 1,680 awards from 2004 to 2019, and the only Ontario source that publishes how many firms took the documents and how many actually bid.
Government of Alberta — 16,579 sole-source contracts. One sentence has to travel with those: there was no competition. It is an incumbency signal and an order of magnitude, never a price band and never a comparable.

Three levels of answer, and why they differ

What you get follows directly from the list above.

A full report with a score — in Quebec. The calibrated price band, the number of bidders to expect, the likely competitors by name, and the go/no-go recommendation. The reason this stops at the provincial line is specific: the recommendation is a weighted rubric over five factors, one of which is mandatory — sector fit — and that factor is computed from Quebec bidding history. Without it the rubric refuses to score rather than inventing one.

An aperçu, with no score. For federal notices, Toronto and the municipal portals: the incumbent, the buyer's award record, a price reference drawn from comparable contracts, the firms that keep winning, and the tender's own documents. It is published only when there is genuinely enough to fill it. Of the open federal notices measured on 21 August 2026, 799 out of 908 cleared that bar.

A price reference is not a calibrated price band, and we never blur the two. The Quebec report's band states a measured, checkable coverage rate, published on the accuracy page. The federal reference is simply the spread of what was actually paid on similar contracts.

A plain listing, when there is nothing honest to add.

This is the same principle as Our numbers don't come from an AI: a useful tool has to be able to say it does not know. An aperçu instead of a score is that rule applied to coverage rather than to statistics.

The part that surprises people

The bids&tenders portals publish the full bid ladder. They are the only source outside Quebec that does. So what is missing before Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta can carry a score is not the data — it is a second rubric, built on those provinces' own history instead of Quebec's.

With one caveat we measured on 22 August 2026, over 451 Ontario contests: the lowest compliant bid won more than nine times out of ten. Where price decides that completely, a band and a gap-to-winner stay useful, but a win-probability model has almost nothing left to learn.

What is missing, and why

The answer is not technical. It is a question of permission.

MERX — a private commercial platform. Infrastructure Ontario and Metrolinx publish there.
Ontario Tenders Portal (Supply Ontario) — no listing is reachable without an account. The legitimate route is a data-access request, not a workaround. Ontario's open data portal publishes no tender or award feed at all.
BC Bid — behind a login, under a personal, non-transferable, non-sublicensable licence.
Alberta Purchasing Connection — its terms of use prohibit automated access and grant no redistribution licence.
SAP Ariba — Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta's two largest buyers, post there.
Biddingo, Bonfire — per-organization portals.
Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the Atlantic provinces and the territories — we track federal notices there and nothing else.

Hence the caveat the map already carries: a pale province means we track few there, never few are published there.

Where to look in the meantime

We would rather send you straight to the source than imply coverage we do not have. The federal government maintains the official list of other tendering websites.

Federal — CanadaBuys
Quebec — SEAO
Ontario — Ontario Tenders Portal
British Columbia — BC Bid
Alberta — Alberta Purchasing Connection
Saskatchewan — SaskTenders
Manitoba — Government Tenders
New Brunswick — New Brunswick Opportunities Network
Nova Scotia — Public Tender Notices
Prince Edward Island — Tenders
Newfoundland and Labrador — Public Procurement Agency
Yukon — Bid on a Government Contract
Northwest Territories — Contract Event Opportunities
Nunavut — Nunavut Tenders
Aggregators — MERX, bids&tenders, Biddingo

What works on any tender at all

Here is the point this article exists to make, and it is easy to miss: coverage decides what we can forecast, not what the application can do.

The moment you have the solicitation documents — whatever the province, whatever the source, including an invitation-only RFP that appears on no portal — you upload them and the application reads them. Nothing in that path touches our warehouse.

Legal. Every obligation, penalty, warranty and risk clause, each with its exact quote and a link to the page it came from. Each one is rated on two independent axes: whether breaching it makes your bid ineligible, and whether it is the kind of condition a competent firm could realistically fail. Those are not the same thing, and confusing them is the most common way to spend a day on boilerplate.
Key dates. Every date the tender fixes, normalized, with the ones coming up pulled to the front. An addendum that moves a deadline does not erase the old one: it stays listed, struck through, marked as superseded, and stops counting as urgent.
The recommendation. It is always attempted. Where comparables exist it leans on them; where they do not it falls back to your own submission, your past bids and your company profile, with no call to the warehouse at all. A lack of market pricing is never by itself a reason to walk away, and a credential missing from your profile is treated as something to confirm, never as proof that you do not have it.
Documents to produce, and validation of your files. Requirements scattered across several tender documents are merged into one entry per deliverable, tagged by what it will cost you to get: to fill in, from a template, to create, to supply, to obtain. The split between the last two is lead time, because lead time is what changes your plan. Then every file you upload is checked against the requirements and against your own company record: a missing or unauthorized signature, a wrong licence number, a price or quantity error, a figure that contradicts your profile, a mandatory attestation that is not there. Cosmetic defects are not reported — unless the error corrupts a value that matters, such as a legal name or a licence number.

Two limits, stated plainly. The application does not fetch a tender from a web address: you supply the files, because most portals do not make them retrievable. And this half of the product needs a subscription — the pricing is public.

Preparing the bid and your documents go through both at length.

The direction

We want to widen the places where a full score is possible, cover more municipalities, and add the provincial portals wherever their terms allow. That last part is not ours to decide: it is a question of permission rather than engineering, and we would rather promise nothing on a timeline we do not control.

What we do commit to is saying what we cover and what we do not, at the point where the question comes up.