GOVCON WEEKLY
Canadian Procurement Pulse: Your Weekly Contractor Insider
Date: August 26 2025
We just got back from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference, which remains one of the better weeks on the calendar. Provincial politicians, municipal councillors, and a bar full of mayors from places like Timmins and Scugog, most of whom will tell you exactly what is broken in their town if you buy the second round. We spent the rest of it with Supply Ontario, the Ontario Public Buyers Association, and our friends at StrategyCorp, and came away with a much clearer picture of what municipalities are actually up against right now.
So we owed you a municipal edition. Apologies to the defence folks, we will be back to you shortly.
Buy Canadian is the loudest phrase in procurement right now, and most of the noise is about Ottawa. But the order counter where it actually bites is municipal. Cities and regions buy the roads, the water mains, the garbage trucks, the software, and they do it in public, one award at a time. So we took the ownership question to the municipal ledger: across 140 Ontario municipalities and 56,148 contracts, who actually owns the firms getting paid. The answer is more Canadian than the headlines assume, and the exceptions are specific enough to act on.
The 30-Second Version
Ontario municipalities already buy Canadian, by a wide margin: of $43.19 billion in disclosed awards from 2019 to 2025, Canadian-owned firms won 77.5 percent by dollars, foreign-owned firms 17.9 percent, and 4.5 percent could not be classified.
The big dollars are even more Canadian than the count: by number of contracts the Canadian share is 70 percent, but by dollars it is 77.5, because the largest awards, road and water construction, are almost entirely Canadian-won.
The foreign share is concentrated, not spread: water and sewer is 87 percent Canadian, roads 84, buildings 83. Information technology is the one category where foreign ownership leads, at 54 percent, with supplies, professional services, and vehicles the next most foreign.
The biggest Buy Canadian opportunity is the co-op vehicle: cooperative purchasing genuinely speeds up buying, pools volume for savings, and lets municipalities collaborate. The firms best represented on it today are the large multinationals, who have used these mechanisms for years in the United States where co-ops are everywhere. Getting more Canadian firms onto the vehicles is the highest-value move.
The read: the Buy Canadian gap is not everywhere. It is in software, advisory and equipment, and in a genuine opportunity, making it easier for Canadian companies to get onto the cooperative purchasing vehicles.
A Note on the Data
The numbers here come from a contract-level database of Ontario municipal awards, 140 municipalities over 2019 to 2025. Disclosed value is a floor: only about two thirds of awards publish a price, and a blank is not a zero, so every dollar figure understates the true total. We report shares of dollars rather than raw totals for that reason. Ownership is classified to the ultimate corporate parent by hand, so a Canadian-operating firm owned by a foreign parent counts as foreign, and the address on the contract is never used to infer where a firm is based. We excluded one known data artifact, and award value is not the same as money spent, so nothing here implies waste. It is a picture of who wins, not of how well anyone buys.
The Buy Canadian Scorecard
The headline number is higher than the debate assumes
77.5 percent of disclosed municipal dollars went to Canadian-owned firms, $33.49 billion of $43.19 billion. Foreign-owned firms took $7.74 billion, and $1.96 billion went to firms we could not classify with confidence.
The construction core is overwhelmingly domestic. The single biggest category, roads, bridges and underground work at $13.05 billion, is 84 percent Canadian. Water, sewer and utilities, at $7.31 billion, is 87 percent. Buildings and facilities, $4.81 billion, is 83 percent. This is the heavy, local, boots-on-the-ground spending, and it stays home.
So the Buy Canadian conversation, in the categories that hold most of the money, is already won. A policy that pushed municipal road and water work toward Canadian firms would be pushing on a door that is 85 percent open.
The interesting part is not the average, it is the spread. Foreign ownership is not evenly distributed, it clusters.
Information technology is the outlier, and the only category where foreign leads. Of $0.80 billion in municipal IT awards, 54 percent went to foreign-owned firms and 39 percent to Canadian. Every other category is majority Canadian. IT is not.
Professional and knowledge work leans foreign next. Professional and advisory services are 65 percent Canadian, engineering and design 67, supplies and equipment 63, vehicles and heavy equipment 69. These are the categories where global firms and global manufacturers compete hardest, and it shows.
The pattern is intuitive once you see it: Municipalities buy their concrete locally and their software globally. The Buy Canadian question is really a question about a handful of categories, not about the whole ledger.
The Co-op Vehicle Opportunity
The single most useful thing a municipality can do for Buy Canadian is not a restriction. It runs through the cooperative purchasing vehicles, and it is an opportunity, not a problem.
Cooperative purchasing is a genuinely good tool: Vendor of Record arrangements, OECM and CANOE let a municipality buy from a pre-competed roster without running its own full tender. That is faster, it pools volume across buyers for real savings, and it lets small municipalities collaborate on buying power they could never assemble alone. Firms on these vehicles won billions over the window, and the vehicles deserve their reputation as the efficient path.
The firms best represented on them today are the big multinationals, and there is a reason: Cooperative purchasing is enormous in the United States, where co-op contracts are a primary way governments buy, and the large global firms have spent years mastering how to get onto vehicles and win through them.
So the vehicles are not the leak, they are the lever: A Canadian firm that is not on a vehicle is invisible to the fastest-growing channel in municipal buying, and most of the firms that have figured the channel out are foreign. The Buy Canadian win is to make the on-ramp easier for Canadian companies, to help more of them qualify and list, so the efficient path and the domestic path become the same path.
This is the constructive version of Buy Canadian: It does not slow anyone down or shut anyone out. It grows the Canadian bench on the vehicles municipalities already trust, and turns cooperative purchasing from a channel the multinationals dominate into one where Canadian firms compete on equal footing.
Who Wins the Work
Zoom back out to the vendors themselves and the shape is clear.
The top of the table is a Canadian construction bench. GIP Paving at $772 million, Bennett Mechanical at $678 million, Maple Reinders at $402 million, RW Tomlinson at $385 million, Technicore Underground at $385 million, GFL Environmental at $380 million. These are the firms that pave the roads, lay the pipe and haul the waste, and they are Canadian.
The largest single foreign vendor is not a tech company. It is Dufferin Construction, at $499 million, owned by CRH of Ireland. The biggest foreign presence in municipal Ontario is a construction prime, a reminder that foreign ownership reaches into the concrete too, just less than it reaches into the servers.
The marquee awards are infrastructure. Pomerleau's $331 million Hamilton building contract, PCL's $268 million for Ottawa's Ādisōke library, three separate Peel water contracts north of $200 million each, and GFL's $197 million Toronto curbside contract. The money is roads, water and buildings, and the buyers are the big ones: Toronto at $11.4 billion, Ottawa at $6.9 billion, Peel at $5.0 billion.
The Provincial Read
The Buy Canadian battle is category-specific: In the money-heavy categories it is already close to won. If a city wants to move its Canadian share, the room to work is in IT, advisory and equipment, not in the road program.
Ownership is the number nobody publishes, and it is the one that matters. A municipality can report how much it spent locally by address in an afternoon. Reporting how much it spent with Canadian-owned firms takes real classification work, and almost no one does it.
The co-op vehicles are the biggest opportunity: They move billions and they genuinely speed up buying and find savings. Today the multinationals who mastered cooperative purchasing in the United States are best represented on them. Helping more Canadian firms get listed is the cleanest place for Buy Canadian to add domestic wins without slowing anyone down.
Your Takeaways
For the municipality, and the residents behind it:
You are probably already buying Canadian, and you can prove it: Most of your dollars go to Canadian-owned firms. The gap, if you have one, is in software, consulting and equipment, so look there before anywhere else.
Lean on cooperative purchasing, and widen the Canadian bench on it: The vehicles save you time and money, so keep using them. Then ask your co-op partners what it would take to get more qualified Canadian firms listed, because a broader domestic roster is Buy Canadian and faster buying at once.
Report by ownership, not by address: A local-spend number counted by billing address overstates domestic capture. The honest metric is who owns the firm.
For the vendor selling into municipal Ontario:
If you are Canadian-owned, say so, clearly and provably: In a Buy Canadian moment that is a scoring advantage, and most of your competitors cannot document it as cleanly as they think.
If you are in IT, advisory or equipment, you are in the contested categories: That is where foreign firms win today and where domestic preference will bite first, in both directions.
Get onto the co-op vehicles: They move real money, $3.3 billion across the three over the window, and they are the pre-competed path most municipalities reach for first. If you are Canadian-owned, this is the highest-value door to get through, and the one your foreign competitors already know well.
How should municipalities focus their procurement policy?
Our Take
The honest read, after a week of talking to the people doing the buying, is that we came away impressed. The firms winning municipal work in Ontario are overwhelmingly Ontario firms, and that is most true in the categories holding the most money. Technology is where the number falls off, with professional services and engineering and design a step behind it, and a gap that narrow is one you can actually close.
The bigger question is the one the ownership data cannot see, which is inputs. We heard it plainly from the bricklayers at AMO: not enough of the brick is coming from here. A Canadian firm laying imported brick still counts as a Canadian win in every table above, so if inputs matter, they belong in the RFP rather than in the assumption.
The co-op vehicles are the other place to push, and pushing there costs nobody any speed. More Canadian firms listed on the vehicles municipalities already trust is the cleanest domestic win available.
Then there is IT, which is the piece all of us have to work on together. That means leaning on the champions we have, OpenText, Cohere, (and maybe even Publicus? 😉 ). Nobody is forcing anyone off American software. The reason to move is dependence, and the sovereignty over our own data that comes back with it.
GovCon Weekly is written by the team at Publicus. We built the AI agent system that helps businesses find and win Canadian government contracts, and it worked well enough that the federal government came to us to use it on their own data. If you want to see opportunities like these before your competitors do, subscribe, or reach out for a demo.
