How we verify what we tell you

What we read

Four classes of public record, collected continuously, alongside the tender portals everyone else reads.

Counts are floors. We publish a rounded-down figure rather than an exact one because the exact one is wrong tomorrow and the floor stays true as the corpus grows.

Every count we publish carries the date it was measured. A number without a date is a number that gets quoted a year later as though it were current, so ours are built so the count and the date cannot be separated by whoever writes the copy.

We do not lead with a portal count. The number that matters is how many kinds of record we read, not how many portals we poll.

What we hold back, and why

Hansard. We hold 190+ documents. Collection is paused pending counsel on the copyright question (strategy doc D4). Released by that ruling, not by a code change. It appears in no claim we make, and our own build fails if a claim names it while the hold stands.

Federal grant programs. We collect 78, measured on 9 September 2026, the same date as the table above. Not one carries a closing date we can read off the page, so not one can reach you as something to act on. That is why we describe our grant coverage as Ontario rather than national. Collected and undated is not the same as covered.

A held source is not a broken one. We would rather name the hold than quietly count it toward a total.

What every item owes you

A citation, on every item. Each item names the publisher’s own record. Where we hold a link to that record, you get the link. Where we do not, you get the record named in full so you can find it yourself. You do not get a link to the listing page we happened to find it on, because that is not the publisher’s record.

A date with its basis. Where we say something closes or was decided, we distinguish what the document stated from what we inferred from its publication date. Those are not the same claim and we do not round one into the other.

No invented dates. A record with no date renders with no date. We do not fill the gap with an estimate to make a page look complete.

What we do not claim

This section is here because its absence is what would make the rest of the page worth nothing.

We do not publish a prediction hit rate. Our own software refuses to display one until the underlying claims have settled and each is anchored to a dated record, and today it returns no settled claims. So there is nothing to show and we show nothing. If you see a competitor publish a hit rate, ask them what population it was measured over and what counted as a hit.

Our weekly register is mostly tender notices, today. We read upstream records, but the list of items in a weekly issue is dominated by open tenders. In the issue of 7 September 2026 the register held 229 tender notices and one item that was not a tender. Across the four most recent issues, between 97.8 percent and 99.6 percent of register items were tender notices.

We are telling you this because you will see it yourself in the first issue you read, and we would rather you heard it from us. The upstream reading is real and the collection dates above are checkable. It reaches you as the forward section of the issue, described below.

Nobody audits us. We have not been audited by a third party and nothing on this site implies otherwise.

The forward section: what an arc is

An arc is one buyer, one purchase, and two or more dated public documents about it, each placed on a rung of the procurement record. The rungs, in order:

How a rung is assigned. Most follow from the kind of document. A tender notice is the tender rung, an award notice is the award, a budget document is the budget line. Board minutes and announcements are read by a model that must quote the sentence it based the rung on; a document it cannot quote does not enter an arc. On the first measured sample, the model made 32 rung calls across 50 documents and 26 were right. That was measured on 12 September 2026, and it is not good enough to publish unchecked, which is why nothing from it is published unchecked.

Every arc is read by a person before it reaches you. Before the section opens, each arc is checked against its source documents on two questions: do these documents describe the same purchase, in a defensible order, and does each quote say what the record says. A figure the quoted sentence does not support holds the arc. An arc that fails either question is held or dropped, and the section does not open while one is rendering.

Which boards it covers today. We are tracing purchases through the published minutes of six Ontario police services boards today: Toronto, Greater Sudbury, York Region, London, Waterloo Region and Durham Region. 45 of those purchases are traced far enough to publish, and 13 of them have reached no tender and no award in the record we hold. Each issue features the ones that have also moved recently. Measured on 16 September 2026, and it moves: a board enters this sentence when one of its purchases is traced and checked, and leaves it when none is.

What we refuse to call an arc. A title, a heading or a fragment is never quoted as the statement behind a rung; if no rung of an arc has a statement, the arc is not shown. One sentence supports one rung, its earliest, so a single line cannot be counted twice. A board receiving a report for information is not a decision, a shortlist of suppliers is a tender and not an award, and a sentence written after the contract was signed is not a consultation. Evidence more than three years apart is treated as separate purchases. Each of these was a real arc we held back, and the rule that held it back is now a test.

What the last rung means. An arc ends where the record we hold stops. An arc whose last rung is a consultation, a budget line or a board decision has no tender notice and no award in what we collect. Those are the purchases we publish: forming, and not yet solicited. It is not a claim that no solicitation exists anywhere. The tender portals we read are a bounded set, and absence from them is not absence.

What we do not claim about an arc. We do not say how long a purchase takes to move from one rung to the next, because we have not measured it; when we have, the figure will carry its sample size or it will not render. We do not say that no vendor is already involved; where the record names one, we show the name. We do not predict. An arc is what the record says, in the order it said it, with every document linked.

Every arc that reaches the section has passed that read.

How to check us

Open any item and follow its citation to the publisher’s record. That is the whole check, and it is the one we would run first on somebody else.

If a number on this site has no date beside it, or an item has no citation, we have broken our own rule. Tell us and we will fix it.