Find the right tenders

There is no single place Canadian public tenders are published. Federal work is on CanadaBuys, Québec work is on SEAO, and Ontario municipal work is scattered across two commercial platforms and 444 individual websites. Checking all of it is a job nobody has time for.

We watch it and rank it. Today that is 48,834 tracked notices, refreshed daily.

Two ways to tell us who you are

Describe your firm. Type what you build, where, and the job sizes you go after — “watermain and sanitary sewer replacement, Montérégie, jobs around $500K”. That is enough to rank the whole open market for you, and you can try it on the front page right now without an account.

Or look up your bidding record. If your firm has bid on Québec public work, we already hold that history — it is published as open data — and we can rank from what you have actually pursued rather than from a description. That is the stronger of the two, and it is available to beta firms.

The two know different things, and we have measured how differently: for the same firm they agree on 2 of 8 top results. The record knows what you have demonstrably done at what scale; the description knows what you are chasing now. Neither is wrong.

What the fit score means

A fit score is how much this tender looks like the work your firm goes after — not a chance of winning, and we are careful never to imply otherwise. It is an absolute number, not a position in the list: a 25 means a weak match, not fifth place. If today’s market has nothing good for you, every score will be low, and that is the honest answer.

Why some tenders show an estimated size

Under 1% of notices publish a value. So where a buyer says nothing, we estimate the contract size from what comparable work has actually gone for — and we mark it as an estimate every time, because it is one.

• “$1.2M (published)” — the buyer stated it.
• “~$100–500K (estimated)” — our figure, from similar past contracts.
• “size unknown” — we have no usable signal, which is true of about 44% of open notices. We would rather say so than guess.

Our estimates land in the exactly-right band 41.7% of the time and within one band 92.1% of the time, measured on contracts the model had never seen. Use them to sort a list, not to price a job. The full working is here.

Coverage, stated plainly

Québec is well covered. SEAO publishes everything openly, including who bid on what, so both ranking and size estimation are strong there.

Ontario is not, and no amount of effort on our side fixes it. We survey all 444 municipalities and ingest what is publicly posted, but most Ontario municipal tenders sit behind portals we monitor rather than republish. For some Ontario searches the honest result is a short list with a note saying it is short — which is what you will see, rather than a padded page. The measurements are here.

If you work in Ontario, the practical use today is the compliance side and the federal and openly-posted municipal notices we do carry. We would rather tell you that up front than have you find out in month two.