Quebec's Quiet Markets: Buyer-Level Competition in Public Tendering
Which public buyers actually get competition? Among Quebec's largest tendering organizations, the answer spans almost the entire possible range — and the variable is not size, sector fashion, or the calendar year. It is what is being bought, and from whom.
- Across the thirteen largest buyers (60,050 tenders, 2021–2026), the weighted single-bid rate is 65.5% — but the spread runs from 37.3% to 92.6%.
- Infrastructure buyers lead: the Société québécoise des infrastructures averages 2.86 bidders (41.0% single-bid); the transport ministry's bids administration 2.74 (37.3%).
- Health and university buyers trail: the Sherbrooke university hospital network averages 1.21 bidders — 92.6% of its 4,034 tenders drew exactly one bid.
- Université Laval (85.3%) and McGill (81.1%) run single-bid rates far above the big-city municipalities they share a labour market with.
- Montreal's transit authority draws {pc(qc_buyers[3]['single_pct'])} single-bid tenders — competition is not a function of buyer sophistication or budget.
From market to buyer. Our earlier working paper established the market-level fact: across 405,956 Quebec tenders, 67.4% drew exactly one bid. But the market-level rate is an average of organizations behaving very differently. Quebec's tendering publication is granular enough to name the buyer on every call, which makes the single-bid rate computable per institution — a measurement no other large North American jurisdiction supports. This paper ranks the thirteen largest buyers and asks what separates the buyers who get competition from the buyers who buy alone.
| Buyer | Tenders | Avg. bidders | Single-bid |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ministère des Transports et de la Mobilité durable (Direction de l'administration des appels d'offres publics) | 6,569 | 2.74 | 37.3% |
| Ville de Québec | 6,365 | 2.34 | 57.2% |
| Ville de Laval | 6,185 | 2.29 | 64.4% |
| Société de transport de Montréal | 5,866 | 1.44 | 84.9% |
| Ministère des Transports et de la Mobilité durable (Direction générale de la gestion contractuelle) | 4,409 | 2.53 | 50.6% |
| Ministère des Transports (Direction de l'administration des appels d'offres publics) | 4,397 | 1.87 | 69.9% |
| Université Laval | 4,339 | 1.45 | 85.3% |
| Ville de Gatineau. | 4,060 | 2.26 | 50.1% |
| Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux de l'Estrie - Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke - CHUS | 4,034 | 1.21 | 92.6% |
| Ministère des Transports et de la mobilité durable (Direction de l'administration des appels d'offres publics) | 3,727 | 1.98 | 65.9% |
| Université McGill | 3,720 | 1.54 | 81.1% |
| Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux de la Mauricie-et-du-Centre-du-Québec (CIUSSS MCQ) | 3,232 | 1.42 | 85.0% |
| Société québécoise des infrastructures | 3,147 | 2.86 | 41.0% |
Infrastructure gets bidders; institutions do not. The top of the competition table is infrastructure. The Société québécoise des infrastructures — the provincial body that builds and renovates public buildings — averages 2.86 bidders per tender with only 41.0% single-bid calls. The transport ministry's central bids administration performs nearly as well (2.74 bidders, 37.3%). These buyers purchase what deep regional markets supply: construction, civil engineering, roadworks — categories where dozens of qualified firms exist, switching costs are low, and the tender documents are standardized enough that bidding is cheap. Competition here is not produced by procurement virtue; it is received from the market structure underneath.
The quiet buyers. The bottom of the table is institutional. The Sherbrooke university hospital network (CHUS) drew 92.6 single-bid tenders at an average field of 1.21 bidders across 4,034 calls. The Mauricie–Centre-du-Québec health network runs 85.0%. Université Laval sits at 85.3% and McGill at 81.1% — institutions sharing a labour and construction market with municipalities that draw two-plus bidders routinely. Montreal's transit authority completes the pattern at 84.9% single-bid. What these buyers share is specialized demand: medical equipment sold through authorized dealers, transit systems with qualified-supplier lists, enterprise software, and services where the incumbent holds the specifications. When only one firm can lawfully or practically supply, publishing a tender produces one bidder — every time.
Municipalities occupy the middle, instructively. The cities spread from Gatineau (50.1%) through Quebec City (57.2%) to Laval (64.4%). Cities buy a mixed portfolio — construction (competitive) alongside fleet, systems and professional services (not) — so their rates blend the two regimes. A city's single-bid rate is therefore a portfolio statement: it measures what share of its spending sits in genuinely contested categories. The same logic scales up: the difference between a 41.0% buyer and a 92.6% buyer is mostly the difference between building standard buildings and buying unsubstitutable things.
What this reframes. Buyer-level data dissolves the temptation to read the single-bid rate as a scorecard of procurement competence. The buyers at the quiet end are not failing to attract bidders that exist; they are buying in markets where bidders do not. Conversely, the competitive buyers deserve less credit than their numbers imply — the road-building market delivers their competition to them. What a buyer-level series genuinely offers is a baseline: institutions can be compared against their own portfolio's realistic ceiling, and drift away from that ceiling — a health network whose rate rises while sister networks' rates hold — becomes the diagnostic worth investigating. Aggregate rates moralize; buyer-level baselines inform.
Limits. Buyer names are as registered in the tendering system: the transport ministry appears as several distinct administrative directions, ranked separately as the registry records them, and the buyer list here is the thirteen largest by tender count rather than an exhaustive census. Field-size averages weight all tenders equally regardless of value; a value-weighted series would shift the picture toward larger calls. The behavioural consequences of these structures — which firms keep bidding into one-bid markets, and at what win rates — are taken up in The Bidders.