Foundations of Canadian Public Procurement Practice.
A free, self-directed course in ten primers — how Canadian public buying actually works, how competition behaves, and how to decide what to chase. Every teaching example is drawn from a compiled record of 1,313,281 federal awards (2004–2026), roughly 400,081 Québec tenders with published methods, and 2,043 bid challenges before the Canadian International Trade Tribunal.
The course
Six modules, ten primers, about nine hours of reading and exercises. Self-directed; start anywhere, but the sequence is designed to build. See the full syllabus →
The market
Where Canadian opportunities live, and how to read a buyer's award history before you write a word.
Outcomes →The documents
RFI, RFQ, RFP, tender — what each commits you to and where proposal effort pays.
Outcomes →Competition analysis
Average bidder counts and single-bid rates, and what they say about a category before you bid.
Outcomes →The proposal
The compliance matrix: the one working document that separates winning proposals from disqualified ones.
Outcomes →Positioning & remedies
Displacing incumbents, and when a bid challenge is worth its cost.
Outcomes →All primers
Finding Canadian government opportunities
Where work is posted across federal, provincial, and municipal portals — and how to build a pipeline instead of checking sites.
Read →RFP, RFQ, RFI, tender — what each one means
The document types, what they commit you to, and which ones are worth a small supplier's time.
Read →The compliance matrix
The single document that separates winning proposals from disqualified ones, and how to build one in an hour.
Read →Bid / no-bid decisions
A scoring method for deciding which opportunities deserve your limited proposal hours — with competition data to inform the call.
Read →Reading competition data before you bid
Average bidder counts and single-bid rates, with worked bid/no-bid examples from real category data.
Read →Displacing an incumbent
Incumbency patterns, the no-tender route around open competition, and when renewal cycles actually open.
Read →Which contract sizes to chase
The real distribution of award sizes, and a survival strategy for small suppliers.
Read →Researching a buyer before you write
How to read a buyer's award history — volume, average size, competition behaviour, and repeat vendors.
Read →When to challenge — and what it costs
The CITT process, the serial-challenger reality, and a decision frame that respects your legal budget.
Read →Understanding single-bid tenders
Why two-thirds of Québec tenders get one bid, and how to tell an opportunity from a locked room.
Read →Also from the Institution
Applied practice notes — three case walkthroughs on real aggregate data. A working glossary of 30 procurement terms, cross-linked to the primers that use them. Answers to common questions, each grounded in the compiled record. Companion statistics at the Public Service Index; open datasets at pubsec/data.