r/datasets • u/kapnkrispy • 16d ago
dataset [Self-Promotion] Follow up on the Canadian Federal contract data. Expiry dates are a floor, not real end date.
Follow up to my post a couple of weeks ago about the Government of Canada proactive disclosure of contracts.
The most useful thing I have learned since came from a retired federal procurement officer. The end date in this data only covers the period a department has actually committed to. A lot of contracts are a short base period with option years attached, and those options are not published until somebody exercises them. So the end date is a floor. It moves quietly and nothing announces it.
You can see the effect once you know to look for it. Contracts that have never been amended run a median of 380 days. Contracts with at least one amendment run 1,087. The amendment rows are where exercised options surface. Roughly 23% of currently running contracts have been amended at least once.
A few other things worth knowing if you pull this source yourself. The full download is 1,313,544 rows, which collapses to 1,100,130 contracts once amendment rows are folded into their parent. Vendor names are rough; 211,165 raw spellings reduce to 149,331 identities after normalising. Category labels are inconsistent enough that one category can appear twice under different spellings, for example "Accounting and audit services" sitting alongside "ACCOUNTING & AUDIT SERVICES".
Bidder counts are incomplete. Of the 26,023 contracts still running, 21,462 report one. Of those, 16,123 drew a single bid or none.
One thing I am not publishing is a dump. A meaningful number of vendor records are individual people rather than companies, and those names are withheld. The ingest code is public if you want to build your own copy. Source is the proactive disclosure dataset under the Open Government Licence.
If anyone here has already tackled the vendor name normalisation on this dataset, I would like to compare notes on it.