Where Federal Contract Dollars Land: Every Province, Ranked

The scale of the record. The federal proactive publication of contracts over $10,000 now spans twenty-three years of award data: 1,313,281 records, $1.21T in committed value, and 183,024 distinct vendor names. The dataset is noisy — vendor names are recorded inconsistently, and value fields shift between commitments and amendments — but at full-corpus scale the geography of federal spending resolves clearly. This report maps each award to the province of the winning vendor's registered address and ranks the provinces by everything the record can measure: value, contract count, vendor population, and average award size.

Ontario is the federal procurement economy. Firms headquartered in Ontario captured $513.6B — 67.1% of all value in the mapped subset — across 263,501 contracts. The average Ontario-origin award is $1.9M, and the province is home to 42,238 distinct federal vendors, more than three times any other province. The driver is structural rather than discretionary: the departments that dominate federal spending — National Defence, Public Services and Procurement Canada, and Shared Services Canada — sit in the National Capital Region, and so do the Canadian head offices of most firms built to serve them. Proximity to the buyer remains the single strongest predictor of federal success the data shows.

Quebec and British Columbia hold the second tier on very different footings. Quebec's $84.8B (11.1%) is broad-based: 12,762 firms winning 66,181 contracts at an average of $1.3M — a profile closer to a scaled-down Ontario than to a resource economy. British Columbia's $82.9B (10.8%) carries the highest average award of any province at $2.1M, a figure lifted by the concentration of federal shipbuilding work at West Coast yards since the early 2010s. Nova Scotia's 4.3% share is consistent with the same program flowing through Halifax shipyards.

The West wins volume, not value. Alberta firms won 28,584 federal contracts — 2.2% of the national count, more than British Columbia's vendor base — yet took only 1.4% of value. The Alberta federal market is a high-frequency, small-ticket market: 5,515 firms competing for an endless sequence of awards averaging $381K. Manitoba (avg. $893K) and Saskatchewan (avg. $1.3M) show the same shape. For suppliers outside central Canada, the viable federal strategy the data supports is repetition across many modest awards, not pursuit of major programs.

The North and the small provinces. The territories together hold under one per cent of value — 0.4% for the Northwest and Nunavut combined, 0.1% for the Yukon — and Prince Edward Island rounds out the table at 0.1%. These shares quantify a regional-concentration question that departmental reports raise annually but never answer with vendor-level data: federal procurement operates, in financial terms, as a central-Canadian industry with regional distribution networks attached.

What the geography cannot tell us. Vendor headquarters is a proxy for where procurement value accrues, not where work is performed. A Dartmouth-registered contractor employing four hundred Calgarians books to Nova Scotia in this analysis. The mapping also depends on postal codes present in 35.3% of records; the unmapped remainder skews toward older awards. Neither caveat overturns the central finding — a five-to-one value gap between Ontario and every province but two — but both bound how precisely the measure should be read.