Canada
How to find Canadian federal tenders (and get alerted for free)
CanadaBuys is the Government of Canada's official tendering portal, operated by Public Services and Procurement Canada. It replaced the old buyandsell.gc.ca system. It publishes open notices (currently accepting bids) and awarded ones, along with open-data files that let services like ours read the same information automatically.
What CanadaBuys publishes
CanadaBuys lists notices from federal departments and agencies: the tender title, the contracting entity, a procurement category, the delivery region, the publication date and the closing date. It also publishes open-data CSV files of new and open tender notices under the Open Government Licence - Canada, which is the data BidHeron reads. Value estimates are not consistently included in this feed, so many Canadian notices on BidHeron show no dollar value even when one exists in the full solicitation document.
The free alternatives
CanadaBuys supports free saved-search email alerts once you register an account, filterable by keyword, procurement category and region of delivery. If your business only bids for Canadian federal contracts, a CanadaBuys alert costs nothing and will always be the most current source, because it is the primary portal.
How BidHeron's alerts work
We parse CanadaBuys' new-tender CSV file every two hours and the full open-tender file once a week, map each notice's procurement category into our 25-category taxonomy alongside UK, EU and US federal data, and match the result against your saved alert. The free plan sends a weekly email. The $19 a month paid plan adds daily delivery, up to five saved alerts, and a fit score and reason for each match.
Provincial and municipal procurement
CanadaBuys, and therefore BidHeron, covers federal procurement only. Provinces, territories, municipalities, crown corporations and health authorities generally run their own tendering portals, which sit outside CanadaBuys and are not covered by BidHeron at the moment.
About the data
Source: CanadaBuys open-data CSV files, Public Services and Procurement Canada. Licence: Open Government Licence - Canada ('Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence - Canada'). Update cadence: new-tender file read every two hours, full open-tender file weekly; category pages regenerate hourly; the status page shows the last successful read. BidHeron does not alter notice facts. Only the summary and fit score are our own generated content.
Questions people ask
- Does BidHeron cover provincial or municipal Canadian tenders?
- Not at the moment. We cover the federal CanadaBuys feed only. Provincial, municipal and crown-corporation procurement generally runs through separate portals we don't read yet.
- Why don't some Canadian notices show a contract value?
- CanadaBuys' open-data feed does not consistently include an estimated contract value, so BidHeron shows 'not published' rather than guessing.
- Is there a free way to get CanadaBuys alerts directly?
- Yes. CanadaBuys supports free saved-search email alerts once you register an account on the portal.
Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence - Canada.