CanadaBuys Data: What It Covers, What It Misses, and Where Else to Look

CanadaBuys is the Government of Canada's official procurement site. It publishes federal tender notices, amendments and award notices, republishes many provincial and municipal notices, and makes its notices available as open data files on the Open Government Portal.

For a vendor, four things on CanadaBuys matter most.

Federal tender notices. Competitive federal solicitations: RFPs, ITQs, RFQs, requests for standing offers and supply arrangements, and advance contract award notices. Each notice carries a solicitation number, the buying organization, commodity codes, closing date and attached documents.

Amendments. Changes to closing dates, requirements and answers to bidder questions are posted against the original notice. They are easy to miss, and missing one can make a bid non-compliant.

Award notices. The winning supplier and contract value, published after award. Award notices are less complete than tender notices, and many lower-value contracts never get one.

Republished and international notices. A large share of provincial and municipal notices appear on CanadaBuys as well as on their home portal. CanadaBuys also carries NATO procurement notices: on September 23, 2026, 963 of the open notices on CanadaBuys were NATO opportunities. Filter them out if you only sell to Canadian public bodies.

In Cothon's index, CanadaBuys accounts for 74,056 notices posted since January 2018.

CanadaBuys is built for federal procurement. Three gaps follow from that.

A quarter of open provincial and municipal tenders. On September 23, 2026, we matched every open notice on seven provincial and municipal portals against CanadaBuys by closing date and title. Of 2,623 open portal notices, 1,547 had been republished on CanadaBuys and 1,076 had not. Coverage varies by portal: BC Bid notices were almost all republished (93%), SEAO notices a little over half (58%), and Ontario municipal notices hardly at all (9%).

Losing bids. CanadaBuys award notices name the winner. They do not tell you who else bid or at what price. For that you need SEAO, the only provincial system that routinely publishes bidder lists with prices, or the municipal portals that post bid results.

Contracts without a competitive notice. Low-value purchases, call-ups against standing offers and many sole-source contracts never appear as tenders. They show up later, if at all, in federal proactive disclosure, which lists contracts over $10,000 by department each quarter.

If you sell to government in more than one jurisdiction, these are the systems that fill the gaps. Counts are open notices with a future closing date in Cothon's index on September 23, 2026.

SEAO (Quebec). The mandatory tendering system for Quebec public bodies, including ministries, municipalities, school service centres and health institutions. Notices are in French. 1,375 open, 584 of them not on CanadaBuys. SEAO is also the best source of competitive pricing in the country: Cothon holds 404,533 SEAO bids, 270,841 of them from bidders who did not win.

Ontario municipal portals. Most large Ontario municipalities and regions post on bids&tenders, which also publishes bid results for many solicitations; Toronto publishes its own open data. 351 open, 321 of them not on CanadaBuys.

Alberta Purchasing Connection. Alberta's provincial and public-sector tendering site. 432 open, 92 not on CanadaBuys.

Ontario Tenders Portal. Used by Ontario ministries and many broader public sector bodies. 73 open, 28 not on CanadaBuys.

BC Bid. British Columbia's provincial system. 301 open, 22 not on CanadaBuys.

BC and Alberta municipal portals. 91 open across the two provinces, 29 not on CanadaBuys.

Federal proactive disclosure. Not a tender source, but the most complete record of what the federal government actually bought. Cothon holds 320,290 of these contract records.

Pulling the files is the easy part. The work is in making them agree with each other.

Deduplicate across sources. The same opportunity often appears on a provincial portal and again on CanadaBuys, usually with a different identifier and a reworded title. CanadaBuys typically prefixes the buyer and notice type to the original title. Match on closing date and title, not solicitation number alone.

Resolve vendor names. A single firm can appear under its legal name, its operating name, a French name and one or more joint ventures. Until those are merged, every competitor count is wrong.

Normalize commodity codes. Federal notices use UNSPSC and legacy GSIN codes. Provincial systems use their own categories or none at all. Pick one taxonomy and map everything to it, and be honest about which records you had to classify yourself.

Keep refreshing. Short-window solicitations can open and close inside a week. Checking once a day is not enough for RFQs and call-ups.

This is what Cothon does in the background: CanadaBuys every two hours, the provincial and municipal portals every six, all normalized to one taxonomy, one vendor registry and both official languages. If you would rather build it yourself, the open data links below are the right place to start.

Does CanadaBuys have an API?

CanadaBuys publishes its tender and award notices as downloadable open data files on the Open Government Portal, which is the supported way to use the data at scale. Check the dataset page for the current formats and update schedule.

Are Quebec tenders on CanadaBuys?

Federal tenders in Quebec are, and many Quebec provincial and municipal tenders are republished there. On the day we measured, 42% of open SEAO notices were not on CanadaBuys, so SEAO remains the complete source for Quebec.

Why are there NATO tenders on CanadaBuys?

CanadaBuys publishes NATO procurement opportunities that Canadian suppliers can bid on. They made up 963 of the open CanadaBuys notices on September 23, 2026.

Where can I see who bid on a government contract?

In Quebec, on SEAO bid-opening results. For many municipal solicitations, on the bids&tenders results page. For federal contracts, CanadaBuys and proactive disclosure show the winner only.