Roadwork, Waste and Water: Competition Is the Rule, but Bidders Are Few

Denis runs a 30-employee municipal services firm in the Montérégie region. Collection, street sweeping, winter maintenance. He bids every year with the same municipalities, and he keeps recognising the same names across the table. The data backs him up.

We looked at 8,042 contracts in this family awarded in Québec between 2021 and 2025: snow removal and winter maintenance of the road network, waste collection and treatment, street and catch-basin cleaning, water treatment and sewer rehabilitation. The buyers are the Ministère des Transports et de la Mobilité durable, the boroughs of Montréal, the Société de transport de Montréal, and many cities.

Few people around the table

These contracts are put out to competition far more often than the average of the eight sectors we measured, and yet competition is thin: 2.5 bidders on average per tender, for a median of 2.

Denis is not wrong to recognise the same names. For a firm his size, the question is not to beat a crowd: it is to be in a position to show up at all.

Our data does not say why they are so few. The explanation likely lies in the nature of these contracts, which require machinery, disposal sites and availability across a territory.

Not all of these tenders are addressed to everyone

The competitive subset is not a homogeneous population. A public notice is addressed to every eligible firm; a call for tenders by invitation is addressed only to the firms that were solicited. In this family, 18.6% of contracts awarded by tender go through an invitation.

That distinction changes which figure to read. On public notices only, the ones you could answer without having been solicited, the share receiving a single bid is 25.6%, against 33.0% across all of the family's tenders.

The overall rate is higher than the public-notice rate: outside public notices, the uncontested share is therefore larger. For a firm already established in a territory, the consequence is direct: part of the files cannot be seen by watching notices, it is seen by being known to the buyer.

Here, competition is the rule, not the exception

61% of contracts in this family are awarded after competition. That is markedly more than in computer hardware, where the proportion falls to 27%.

One clue about the nature of these contracts, and we measure neither their duration nor their amount: when a direct award in this family declares a reason on SEAO, it rarely cites an amount below the threshold. 23.5% do so. Among the direct awards that declare a reason, it is therefore not mainly small contracts.

That share is read on the 60.5% of direct awards that actually declare a reason: the rest publish none, and we do not presume theirs.

One tender in three has a single bidder

33.0% of tenders in this family receive a single bid, and the average stands at 2.5 bidders.

Our data does not give the cause, but the explanation likely lies in the nature of these contracts: they require machinery, disposal sites and availability across a territory, which limits the number of firms able to serve a given municipality.

It takes 234 firms to cover half the contracts in this family awarded by tender. In building, it takes 410.

An honest caveat on that figure: company names on SEAO are not standardized, and the same firm can appear there under several spellings. Real concentration is therefore at least as strong as what we measure, never weaker.

Snow removal, a case of its own

Winter maintenance of the road network looms large in this family of contracts, with its own seasonality, multi-year terms and availability requirements. We devoted a separate analysis to it: municipal snow removal tenders, what cities actually assess.

What this changes for your next bid

Showing up is often enough to be in the running. With an average of 2.5 bidders per tender and one in three drawing no competition, the barrier is not the number of competitors.

A local presence is an asset. Few bidders per tender, one in three with no competition at all: already being established in the territory counts.

Look at who won the previous rounds. These contracts come back periodically: knowing the incumbent and the price it won at changes how you prepare a bid.

Method

These figures are measured from the open data of Québec's electronic tendering system (SEAO), covering contracts awarded between 2021 and 2025. A contract is counted once, whatever the number of lots or amendments.

The share put out to competition covers public calls for tenders, calls for tenders by invitation, which are addressed only to the firms that were solicited, and purchases made through a mandated body or a group of organisations.

The single-bid rate is given twice: across all contracts put out to competition, then on public notices only. The second is a subset of the first, the files a firm can answer without having been solicited. The remainder is not only invitations: it also covers purchases run by a mandated body or a group of organisations, and calls for tenders not published on SEAO.

Sources

Further reading

This analysis is part of our sector series, published from our corpus of Québec public contracts. The full set is gathered in our data and analysis.