Why people look at this
Open competition is the default way public bodies buy. Awards made without one are allowed for specific reasons, and people often want to know how much money goes out that way and to whom.
How it is worked out
- Provincial: every award in the Public Procurement Agency reports that cites an exception clause in section 6 of the Public Procurement Act: only one source reasonably available (6(a)(v)), emergency or urgency (6(a)(iv)), pre-qualified supplier (6(a)(vi)), purchase for resale (6(a)(vii)), security (6(a)(ii)) or rates set by the regulator (6(b)).
- Federal: contracts the department coded as non-competitive (solicitation procedure "TN").
- Each public body's share is its exception awards divided by all its awards in the same reports.
Data used
What it cannot tell you
The provincial reports list limited calls, exceptions and emergency awards, but open-call awards by government departments are posted on MERX and are not in these reports, so a department's share here is of the awards the reports cover, not of everything it bought.
The Open Contracting Partnership's guide to red flags puts it this way: a red flag is not evidence that anything wrong happened. It points at something that may be worth a closer look.
This page and the calculation are generated from one definition, so they cannot drift apart. See the results.