Methodology
Where each figure comes from
The figures on this site are of two kinds: counts drawn from public registries, and measurements of our forecasts on tenders published after their training period. For each: what it counts, where it comes from, when it is rebuilt, and where to read the method in detail.
The sources
Everything starts from public registries. No company reports anything to us.
SEAO, the Quebec government's electronic tendering system, published as open data on Données Québec. It covers every public body in Quebec and, for public calls for tenders, the list of bidders and their prices. It is the source of almost every figure on this site.
Elsewhere in Canada, CanadaBuys federal notices and award notices, the City of Toronto, and the procurement portals of municipalities, regional bodies and transit authorities in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta. Some of these sources publish only the winner, never the losing bids, and what can be drawn from them depends on it.
The sources we index, and what each one publishes · licences and required credits
Data: Système électronique d'appel d'offres du gouvernement du Québec (SEAO), licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
Open notices
The number of open tenders, on the home page and on the search page, is the sum of four counts, each taken where it is taken correctly.
- SEAO: notices whose closing date is real and still to come. A notice with no closing date — most often a sole-source (gré à gré) contract — is not counted.
- CanadaBuys: the deduplicated set of open federal notices. A notice naming two provinces counts once, and a federal notice linked to its SEAO twin is not counted twice.
- Toronto and the municipal portals: summed across provinces, since a municipal notice belongs to one province.
All four require a real, future closing date, so the sum means one thing. The three non-SEAO sources come from the map, rebuilt every hour; if it is more than 36 hours old, the figure falls back to SEAO alone, and the sentence says so.
The map
The map counts, by province and territory, the open tenders we track — and the coverage is not the same everywhere.
This map counts the tenders offra tracks, and the coverage is not the same everywhere. In Quebec, SEAO publishes every public body. In Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta, municipal portals are added — eighty in all, plus the City of Toronto. Elsewhere in Canada, only CanadaBuys federal notices are indexed. And in no province outside Quebec is the provincial portal itself indexed: BC Bid and the Alberta Purchasing Connection permit neither the collection nor the redistribution of their notices. A pale province therefore means “we track little of it”, not “little is published there”.
The market by region and by sector
The regional and sector reports are counts, medians and shares computed on SEAO notices. None comes from a model.
- Two denominators. Volume, buyers and sectors cover every published notice; competitors and the intensity of competition cover only the tenders whose bids are published with their prices.
- A delivery region, not an address. A notice belongs to the region where it declares a delivery, not to where the buyer or the firm has its head office.
- Medians. Estimated values contain entry errors large enough to dominate a sum, so no ranking rests on a dollar total.
Each page is rebuilt when the data warehouse is, and gives its rebuild date and its data cutoff. Its « Method and sources » section gives its own denominators. The market by region
The public procurement review
A dated study, frozen at publication, of the processes awarded on SEAO over a period it names.
Every figure carries the sentence saying what it covers, and the file statistiques.csv lists them all with their definition. An edition changes only through an erratum published on the page, with the old value, the new one and the reason. The review is signed by Philippe Dallaire.
Our forecasts
The price range, the expected number of bidders and the likely competitors are forecasts, and they are measured.
They are evaluated on tenders published after their training period, and every historical fact is rebuilt as it was known on the day the notice was published. The figures on the accuracy page are generated from a single results file; none is typed by hand.
The bid-or-pass verdict
The verdict is not a forecast: it is a grid weighted on five factors, whose weights are shown.
It is given only on SEAO notices, because one of its factors is computed from the Quebec bidding history. “Not enough signal” is a refusal to conclude, not a hedged answer. What the grid cannot see — your costs, your capacity, what is decided outside the public process — is written beside it.
Corrections and authors
An error in a figure? Write to info@offra.ca. The studies and the method and market articles are signed by Philippe Dallaire, Offra's founder; the other articles, by the team.