Québec publishes everything. Ontario doesn't.

Two provinces, two policies, one number that shows what the difference is worth.

That is not a sampling artifact or a gap we could close by trying harder. It is what each province’s publishing policy produces.

What Québec does

SEAO — the Système électronique d’appel d’offres — publishes Québec public procurement as open data under CC-BY 4.0, in the Open Contracting Data Standard, in weekly releases anyone can download without an account.

Crucially, it publishes results: for a completed procurement, who bid and what they bid. Not just the winner — the field.

The consequence is that questions which are simply unanswerable elsewhere become arithmetic. Who competes for municipal watermain work in the Montérégie? How many firms typically bid a $2M road reconstruction? Has this buyer ever awarded to someone outside its region? Those are queries, not research projects.

What Ontario does

Ontario has no equivalent. Municipalities publish individually, and mostly not openly. We checked every one of the province’s 444 municipalities on 2026-07-31:

51% of Ontario’s population is served by municipalities on a single commercial platform; 0.75% by municipalities that post documents openly. And results — who bid, what they bid — are not published in any systematic form at all.

The full municipality-by-municipality breakdown is on the census page.

What each side actually loses

• Ontario contractors lose competitive information. A Québec firm can see how many bidders a comparable job drew. An Ontario firm prices in the dark and finds out afterwards, if at all.
• Ontario municipalities lose a benchmark. A purchasing manager in Québec can check what neighbouring municipalities paid for similar work. In Ontario that comparison requires phone calls.
• Ontario loses the tools. Everything on this site that learns from bidding behaviour learns it from Québec, because that is the only place the behaviour is recorded. Ontario firms get a weaker product for the same money — not by our choice.
• Québec loses some privacy, deliberately. This is the real trade. A Québec firm’s bidding is public in a way an Ontario firm’s is not. Reasonable people can disagree about whether that is the right settlement; Québec made the call explicitly, and it is the transparent one.

The part that is fixable

Ontario does not need to build SEAO to close most of this gap. Two changes would do most of the work:

• Publish award results in a common format. Winner and value at minimum; bidder list ideally. Most municipalities already report awards to council — the data exists, in minutes, unstructured.
• Require a machine-readable notice feed as a platform condition. Municipalities buy these platforms. A procurement requirement that the platform expose an open feed of the municipality’s own notices would cost the municipality nothing.

Neither requires new legislation or a provincial portal. Both are procurement decisions municipalities already make, one contract renewal at a time.

Meanwhile: if you are an Ontario firm, the census is the map of where to register, and the scale piece covers what you can still infer from a notice that publishes nothing.