Index › Methodology
Methodology
How the Index is built: coverage by series, definitions, caveats, and the revision policy.
How the Index is built
All statistics are computed by our research team from a continuously compiled corpus of Canadian public-sector contracting records — federal, provincial, and municipal — spanning 2004 to the present. The corpus combines public notice and award records with bidder-level detail where published, normalized into a single schema under version control. Each release recomputes every series from scratch.
Coverage
| Series | Records | Period | Principal source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Federal awards over $10K | 1,313,281 | 2004–2026 (partial) | TBS Proactive Publication (open.canada.ca), OGL-Canada |
| Quebec tenders, named bidders | 405,956 | 2021–2026 (partial) | Quebec public tender notices (SEAO) as published |
| CITT bid-challenge documents | 2,043 | 1990–2026 (partial) | Canadian International Trade Tribunal registry |
| British Columbia awards | 15,068 | 2012–2026 (partial, incl. 312 undated) | BC public award notices as published |
| Vendor geography | 464,227 records with postal code | 2004–2026 | Award-record postal codes |
Definitions
No-tender rate. Share of awards recorded as awarded without an open competitive process, among records carrying a procedure label.
Single-bid rate. Share of tenders receiving exactly one bid, among tenders where bidder counts are published.
Vendor concentration. Share of total value or count won by the 100 highest-value vendors.
Full working definitions of all 15 measures used on this site are in the glossary.
Caveats
Federal figures cover awards above reporting thresholds. Province attribution uses vendor postal codes where published. Partial years are marked. Vendor and buyer names are exactly as published; legal-name variants count separately. Because coverage depth varies by jurisdiction, cross-provincial comparisons should be read with the method notes in each release. The 2025 Quebec volume shift is flagged as a probable coverage break on the Quebec page.
Revision policy
Series are recomputed at each release and may be revised without notice, including for closed years, when late records arrive. Partial-year figures are provisional. Changes to definitions are noted in the release notes and never applied silently.