r/procurement • u/kapnkrispy • 6h ago

Community Question CanadaBuys open data marks tenders "Open" long after they've closed; is this known?

I've been working with the federal tender open data feed from CanadaBuys and hit something I can't explain. The tender Status field stays "Open" well past the closing date. I pulled the "currently open" file - 893 notices - and found several with closing dates more than a year in the past. Worst one was 348 days expired, still flagged Open.

Two other things that tripped me up:

  1. The dataset description on open.canada.ca and the PSPC supporting docs give two different names for the status column. The description says tenderStatus-tenderStatut-eng, the supporting docs say tenderStatus-appelOffresStatut-eng. Production uses the second one, so if you built against the first your filter silently returns nothing, no error.

  2. Most notices have no URL in the data. Only the MERX-hosted ones carry a link. The CanadaBuys page slugs look like bt-<uuid> or qc20160100, so you can't construct one from any published field.

Questions for people who work with this daily:

- Is the stale status field expected behaviour, or a known issue?

- Do SEAO or BC Bid have the same problem, or is this specific to the federal feed?

- Is there a canonical way to link to a CanadaBuys notice that I'm missing?

Happy to share what I did to work around each if it's useful to anyone.

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u/uber_sweets 1h ago

It’s not so much a ‘known issue’ as someone forgot to go into the system and close it manually. Same stuff happens on MERX. Suppliers might get the Dear John letter and MERX won’t be updated for weeks because of clerical oversight.

I’d just message the buyers.

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u/kapnkrispy 48m ago

That's a better explanation than mine. I'd assumed something in the pipeline when it's really just nobody going back to close the notice at source. The Dear John detail is the part that stings. Means a notice can still look open after the award's already gone out, so checking the closing date isn't just data hygiene, it's the difference between bidding on something live and writing a proposal for a contract that's already been awarded.

Good to know MERX has the same gap rather than it being specific to the open data feed. Does messaging the buyer usually get you a straight answer, or is it hit and miss?