Canada’s official public record of low-value federal contracting contains dollar figures that are mathematically impossible under the government’s own reporting rules, rows duplicated verbatim across separate years, and dozens of missing annual filings, a review of Treasury Board Secretariat data shows.
The file, titled “Aggregated Total — Contracts $10K and under,” is the only public accounting of the great majority of federal contracting activity. Individual contracts worth more than $10,000 are disclosed one by one. Everything at or below that threshold is reported only as an annual lump sum: how many contracts an organization signed, and what they were worth in total. The Office of the Procurement Ombudsman has found that low-dollar-value contracts “make up roughly 92% of federal contracting activity,” and have consistently exceeded 90 per cent for two decades.
Because every contract counted in the file is by definition worth $10,000 or less, dividing an organization’s reported total by its reported contract count cannot produce a figure above $10,000. In the version of the file published on open.canada.ca and last modified Sept. 4, it does — repeatedly.
The Canada Revenue Agency’s entry for 2023 reports 349 service contracts worth a combined $74,267,273.98. That works out to roughly $212,800 per contract, more than 21 times the ceiling. The agency’s own figures for neighbouring years put the average nearer $2,800.
Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions reports, for 2019, 74 goods contracts totalling $12,687,097 — an average of about $171,400 — and 94 service contracts totalling $26,189,506, an average near $278,600. The same agency’s 2020 filing reports 58 goods contracts totalling $148,955.09, an average of roughly $2,570.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s 2021 entry reports 4,437 goods contracts worth $68,669,453.47, an average above $15,400. Its 2025 entry reports 871 construction contracts worth $13,494,318.13, an average near $15,500. The Office of the Auditor General’s 2019 entry reports 58 goods contracts worth $1,106,398.13 — about $19,075 each.
Several rows appear to have been copied rather than compiled. The Canada Revenue Agency’s 2020 and 2021 entries are identical in all 10 numeric fields, to the cent: 176 goods contracts worth $451,179.14, 230 service contracts worth $637,942.75, and 104,896 acquisition-card transactions worth $49,611,894.39. Fisheries and Oceans reports the same acquisition-card figures — 202,693 transactions worth $131,027,598.63 — for both 2020 and 2021. National Defence reports construction contracts worth exactly $10,284,492.55 in both 2023 and 2024.
Environment and Climate Change Canada’s 2021 entry lists the identical figure, $18,566,507.86, as the original value of both its goods contracts and its service contracts, with an identical amendment value of $1,100,638.46 recorded against each. The same organization has one row in which the year field reads simply “0.”
Other entries record amendments that dwarf the contracts they amend. The National Research Council reports service contracts worth $9,442,339.09 in 2018 against amendments of $18,781,447.27, and a nearly identical pattern in 2019. Fisheries and Oceans reports a negative goods amendment of $13,772,726.53 for 2019.
The gaps are as striking as the numbers. The Directive on the Management of Procurement requires federal organizations to publish these aggregate totals annually, by May 30 of the following calendar year. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, one of the largest federal departments, has filings for 2017, 2018 and 2019 and nothing since. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission appears once, for 2025. The Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP appears once, for 2017. The Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency is missing four years, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council four, and the Canada Border Services Agency three, covering 2020 through 2022.
Nothing in the dataset or its accompanying documentation explains any of these discrepancies. The dataset carries a standard caveat that the information is unaudited, is derived from data supplied by the reporting organizations themselves, and that no warranty as to its accuracy is stated or implied.
The pattern is consistent with transcription and unit errors made at the departmental level rather than with any finding about how the money was actually spent. Nothing in the file establishes that a single dollar was misspent. What it does indicate is that these aggregate figures cannot at present be relied upon to say how much the federal government spends through its most common form of contracting, or how often it does so.
Auditor General Karen Hogan’s June 2024 report on professional services contracts concluded that federal organizations frequently disregarded federal contracting and procurement policies and guidance. That audit examined compliance in the awarding of contracts rather than the accuracy of the disclosure data itself.
This review covers the portion of the file running alphabetically from the Administrative Tribunals Support Service of Canada to the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada, roughly 440 rows. Organizations falling later in the alphabet, including Public Services and Procurement Canada, the RCMP, Statistics Canada and Transport Canada, were not examined. Whether the same patterns appear in those records has not been established, and this remains a developing review.
Sourcing note
All figures in this article are taken from primary records published by the Government of Canada. No figure has been estimated. Averages were calculated by dividing a reported total value by the reported contract count in the same row.
- Primary dataset: Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, “Proactive Publication — Contracts,” resource “Aggregated Total — Contracts $10K and under” (contractsa.csv). Record modified Sept. 4, 2026. Dataset page: https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/d8f85d91-7dec-4fd1-8055-483b77225d8b — Direct file: https://open.canada.ca/data/dataset/d8f85d91-7dec-4fd1-8055-483b77225d8b/resource/2e9a82e2-bb18-4bff-a61e-59af3b429672/download/contractsa.csv
- Reporting obligation and $10,000 threshold: Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, “Guide to the Proactive Publication of Contracts,” which sets out that annual proactive publication of aggregate data for contracts and amendments $10,000 and under is required by May 30 of the following calendar year: https://www.tbs-sct.canada.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=32763
- Share of federal contracting represented by low-value contracts: Office of the Procurement Ombudsman, “Low Dollar Value Contracting,” knowledge deepening and sharing study: https://opo-boa.gc.ca/faiblevaleur-dollarvalue-eng.html
- Auditor General context: Office of the Auditor General of Canada, Report 5 — Professional Services Contracts, June 2024: https://www.canada.ca/en/auditor-general/media-room/policies-frequently-disregarded-by-federal-organizations-when-awarding-professional-services-contracts.html
Limitations. The copy of contractsa.csv retrieved for this review was truncated at approximately 73,700 characters, yielding roughly 440 data rows covering organizations alphabetically from the Administrative Tribunals Support Service of Canada through the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada. Organizations later in the alphabet were not reviewed. The dataset’s “year” field is reported here as published; the Treasury Board documentation frames the filing deadline in terms of the following calendar year. The Treasury Board Secretariat has not commented on these discrepancies, and no explanation for them appears in the dataset or its published documentation.
