The federal contract that pays Parsons Inc. to manage the cleanup of Yellowknife’s Giant Mine is now listed at more than $2 billion, but about $783 million of that growth does not appear in any amendment the government has disclosed, according to an analysis of Ottawa’s own proactive disclosure records.
Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), which awarded the main construction manager contract in December 2017 on behalf of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, has filed 32 entries for the deal (procurement ID EW70241166) in the federal register of contracts over $10,000 on open.canada.ca. The newest six, filed for April to June 2026, put its value at $2,035,652,878.80, with work running to March 31, 2035.
Each entry in the register is supposed to show the contract’s new total and the value of the amendment that produced it. For most of the contract’s life, those figures line up to within a few hundred thousand dollars. Since 2024 they reconcile almost to the cent. But in the entry for April to June 2023, the contract’s value jumps to $991.4 million from $249.7 million in the previous filing, while the amendment field for that quarter shows only $7.2 million. That leaves $734.5 million of growth with no amendment value attached.
Two smaller gaps follow, $11.5 million in late 2023 and $32.3 million in spring 2024. Added together, the amendments PSPC has reported total $1.20 billion, while the contract has grown by about $1.99 billion from the original value shown in most filings. The difference, roughly $783 million, is Canada News Media’s own arithmetic from the published entries.
The timing of the largest jump lines up with a public milestone. Parsons announced on Feb. 8, 2023, that PSPC had awarded it “term two” of the contract, effective Feb. 2, 2023, carrying it through the remainder of the project. That date falls in the January to March 2023 quarter. The register contains no entry for this contract for that quarter, or for the October to December 2022 quarter before it. The next filing, for April to June 2023, extends the delivery date from 2023 to 2035 and carries the higher total, but records the change as a $7.2 million amendment.
Treasury Board guidance for the disclosure program recommends that when a contract option is exercised, it be reported as an amendment at that time, unless the full value including options was reported at award. In this file, the earliest entries list an original value of $49.8 million, nowhere near the later total.
That original value has itself changed. Every entry from 2018 through March 2026 lists it as $49,810,077.55. The six entries filed for April to June 2026 list it as $31,719,286.20. The lower figure matches the roughly $32 million for two years of care and maintenance that was reported when the contract was announced in February 2018, according to CIM Magazine. The register offers no note explaining the restatement.
The entries also list the number of bids as zero, although the contract is described as competitively sourced. Treasury Board guidance allows a zero when the figure is not available at the time of reporting, but says the record should be updated afterward. It has stayed at zero in every filing since 2021, when the field first appears.
The scale matters. In November 2022, Treasury Board approved a $4.38 billion cost estimate for the Giant Mine Remediation Project, covering 2005 to 2038 and including $710 million already spent, The Canadian Press reported. The single Parsons management contract now equals about 46 per cent of that estimate. The project is the most expensive federal environmental cleanup in Canadian history, and involves sealing 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust underground beside Great Slave Lake.
Nothing in the records suggests the money was spent improperly, and a missing amendment line may reflect a reporting error rather than a contracting one. But the disclosure system exists so taxpayers can follow how contracts grow, and for this one, the largest single increase is not shown as an amendment at all. Canada News Media found no public explanation of the gaps in PSPC or CIRNAC materials.
The analysis covers all 32 entries for the contract in the proactive disclosure dataset, as published Oct. 1, 2026.
If you find reporting like this useful, consider supporting Canada News Media, an independent Canadian newsroom with no corporate parent.
Sources: Government of Canada, Proactive Publication: Contracts over $10,000 (procurement ID EW70241166) and its data dictionary; Parsons release, Feb. 8, 2023; CIM Magazine, Feb. 21, 2018; The Canadian Press via CFJC Today, November 2022. Photo: Giant Mine remediation site, 2014, CambridgeBayWeather, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
