The Notice Is Free — Northern Temper

In brief

The law is already on the contractor’s side. Article 506.5 of the Canadian Free Trade Agreement makes every tender notice free. Article 509 requires the buyer to hand a supplier everything needed to write a real bid: the criteria, the weightings, the drawings, the terms.
Two public doors already do it. CanadaBuys posts the full file free and publishes an open data file every morning. Ontario Tenders does the same. Quebec and the private portals still charge for the documents.
The firm at the door is not a spectator: a licensed Canadian contractor, already insured, already working for public institutions, already the supplier this policy says it wants.
What stands between the notice and the file is a login. On MERX it is $600 a year for one province, $2,004 for the country, paid before anyone knows whether the job was theirs to bid. Article 506.6 permits it in two words: a cost, “if any.”
Nobody was handed this. A bank subsidiary won a national competition in 1997 to run the bulletin board; the bank sold it in 2002 for $6.5M plus royalties; the login outlived every owner since. The value was never the screen. It was being the only door.
Three directions, any of which would do, and a council can take the first one this month: post the full file free the same day as the notice; let a charge recover a printed set and nothing else; let a private portal take the bids but never keep the only copy.

How to read this

Every figure here is dated and sourced in the receipts at the end. The prices are MERX’s own, as published, and the two that matter render from one file on this site with the date they must be checked again.

It is written for the people who could change it: a council, a school board, a hospital’s procurement office, a provincial minister, and the contractor who pays the toll.

Northern Temper, October 2026. The receipts are at the end.

01 · The toll You cannot bid on a job you are not allowed to read.

The firm at the door is not a spectator. It is a licensed contractor, already insured, already working for public institutions, already the Canadian supplier this policy says it wants.

A city posts a mechanical contract. The notice is a few lines. The scope, the drawings, and the reason a firm would be disqualified sit behind a private login. The fee is due before anyone knows whether the job is even theirs to do.

That is the whole insult. The notice is free, because the trade agreement says so. The document that tells you if you are wasting a week is not.

Figure 1 · The notice, the login, the file. The law makes the first free and the third complete. The second is where the charge sits.^{5, 6}

$600: About one province, for a year. MERX’s Local plan, $50 a month billed annually, checked 27 October 2026.⁶
$2,004: National access, same plans, same date. Or a one-time access fee to open a single solicitation, at a price MERX does not publish.⁶
$0: What Article 506.5 of the Canadian Free Trade Agreement requires for the notice itself.⁵

A small contractor does not pay that to be informed. They pay it to be allowed to look.

Try it The same tender, two doors.

One notice, as a public buyer might post it. Open its file through each door and count what it cost to find out whether the job was yours.

Tender notice · free, by Article 506.5

Arena mechanical upgrade

A city · Goods and services · Closes in 21 days

Documents: see the buyer’s portal.

Door one · A public portal

Open the file

The file

Scope: replace two rooftop units, rebalance the air handling, ninety days to complete.
Drawings M-101 to M-108, attached.
Evaluation: price 60, schedule 20, past work 20.
Disqualified: no licensed mechanical contractor named on the bid.

Cost to read: $0. No account.

Door two · A private portal

Open the file

Local, one province: $50 a month, billed annually. $600 a year.
National: $167 a month, billed annually. $2,004 a year.
Or a one-time access fee for this solicitation, at a price the portal does not publish.

Pay the toll

The file

Scope: replace two rooftop units, rebalance the air handling, ninety days to complete.
Drawings M-101 to M-108, attached.
Evaluation: price 60, schedule 20, past work 20.
Disqualified: no licensed mechanical contractor named on the bid.

Cost to read: $600 to $2,004 a year, paid before you knew the last line applied to you.

The same file, the same four lines. A mock: the buyer, the job and the drawings are invented; the prices are MERX’s, as published.⁶

02 · How it was acquired Not a birthright. A contract that never gave the files back.

No one handed a family a monopoly. A bank won a technology competition in 1997. The tollbooth outlived the contract.

Figure 2 · From a trade agreement to a private login, 1994 to today

1994
The Agreement on Internal Trade. Governments needed one place to post work, instead of a newspaper in every capital. The aim was equal access.¹
1997
A national competition. Cebra Inc., a subsidiary of the Bank of Montreal, won it. Manitoba said so on 16 April: awarded because it met the requirements “at the lowest overall cost to subscribers.” The service was named MERX. It was access. It was also, on day one, a subscription.²
2002
The bank sold the business. On 11 December, Mediagrif bought MERX from BMO Financial Group for $6.5M, plus royalties, as reported by Lexpert. A public function changed hands for the price of a small building.³
Now
Mediagrif became mdf commerce in 2020. KKR took mdf commerce private in May 2024, and that August it became SOVRA. The login remained. The company sells the buying software back to the agencies. The charge on the supplier is what is left of the original bargain.⁴

Nobody had to corrupt a procurement officer for this. Governments outsourced the bulletin board, then left the bulletins inside the vendor’s building. After a few hundred cities, school boards, and hospitals posted there, leaving looked harder than staying.

The value was never the screen. It was being the only door.

03 · The sentence that permits it The law already flinched.

Chapter Five of the Canadian Free Trade Agreement covers federal buyers and, above its thresholds, municipalities, school boards, and publicly funded hospitals and colleges. The text is at cfta-alec.ca.⁵

Figure 3 · Three articles. The first makes the notice free. The third makes the file complete. The second lets the file carry a price, in two words.⁵

Article 506.5: “All tender notices shall be available to suppliers free of charge.” This part, the country already obeys. A title, a buyer, a date. Enough to know something is for sale. Not enough to know if you can do it.
Article 506.6: The notice must say how to obtain the documents, “and their cost and terms of payment, if any.” Those two words, if any, are the entire privilege. The headline is a public good. The document is allowed to be a product.
Article 509: Then requires the opposite of a teaser. The buyer must make available everything a supplier needs to write a real bid: the criteria, the weightings, the specifications, the warranty, the terms of submission. A notice without that file is not a tender. It is an advertisement for a paywall.

A fee to mail a drawing set, in 1997, was a handling charge. A subscription to learn whether you are eligible, in 2026, is a cover charge on public spending.

04 · The country already knows how Ottawa did not wait for permission.

Door	Who it serves	The file
CanadaBuys	Government of Canada tenders, and an open data file refreshed each morning.⁷	Free
Ontario Tenders	Supply Ontario. Provincial competitions.⁸	Free
SEAO	Quebec. Provincial, municipal, health, and education. The notice is free to read; the documents are ordered and charged, by the page or by subscription.⁹	Paid
MERX	Private. Useful as a bundle, and sometimes the only full copy a city left behind. Free to read only where the buyer has paid for you.⁶	Paid

Figure 4 · The four doors. Two public portals post the full file free. The other two charge for it, one of them a province.

In June 2025 the federal government began reciprocal procurement: sell to Canada if you would let a Canadian sell to you. That is a rule about who may be paid. It is not yet a rule about who may read.¹⁰

Buy Canadian, and then rent the doorway from a private network, is not an industrial strategy. It is a slogan with a tollbooth in front of it. MERX is the oldest and the widest of those booths. It is not the only vendor. The rule should not name a company. It should name the file.

05 · What to direct One vote. Or one instruction. Either will do.

Post the full file, free, the same day as the notice.
Every public buyer covered by Chapter Five: ministries, municipalities, school boards, hospitals, and the corporations they control. The solicitation a supplier needs in order to decide, not a summary that points at a login.
A charge may recover a printed set. It may not gate the digital file.
“Cost, if any” in Article 506.6 was a mailing charge. It is not a right to sell eligibility.
A private portal may take the bids. It may not keep the only copy.
Cities can keep whatever system receives submissions. Custody of the documents is not a concession. If it is on MERX, it is also on the public record.

A statute would be cleaner. A directive would be faster. A council can free its own city this month, without waiting for anyone in Ottawa to feel brave.

We are not asking for a preference, a set-aside, or a contract. We are asking that a Canadian firm be allowed to read the work.

Northern Temper

October 2026

Words used here Five terms, plainly.

Tender notice: The public announcement that a buyer wants bids: who is buying, what, and by when. The agreement says it must be free.⁵
Solicitation documents: The file behind the notice: specifications, drawings, evaluation criteria and their weightings, warranty and submission terms. Article 509.7 lists what it must contain. This is what a firm needs to decide, and what a login can price.
Chapter Five: The government procurement chapter of the Canadian Free Trade Agreement, the 2017 successor to the 1994 Agreement on Internal Trade. It binds federal and provincial buyers, and municipalities, school boards and publicly funded health and academic bodies above its thresholds: $100,000 for goods or services and $250,000 for construction at the municipal level.⁵
Electronic tendering service: The one place a government designates for posting its notices, which the agreement requires to be “equally accessible to all Canadian suppliers.” MERX was the first national one; CanadaBuys and the provincial portals are its public successors.¹
Reciprocal procurement: Ottawa’s rule since July 2025 that a supplier from a country which gives Canadian firms no access to its public contracts loses access to Canada’s. A rule about who may be paid.¹⁰

Sources Every figure, named.

Agreement on Internal Trade, consolidated text, Article 506(2)(a): a call for tenders through “an electronic tendering system that is equally accessible to all Canadian suppliers; the notices of a call for tenders shall be available to suppliers free of charge.” The “equal access” aim is Manitoba’s own description of the 1994 agreement, in the release at note 2. sia.sk.ca
Manitoba Government Services, news release, “New Electronic Tendering Service Combines Access with Affordability,” 16 April 1997: the contract “was awarded to Cebra Inc. because of the company’s ability to meet all technical and operational requirements … at the lowest overall cost to subscribers. Cebra, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bank of Montreal”; “MERX will have about 25,000 subscribers when launched”; the service “arose from the 1994 Agreement on Internal Trade, which is aimed at providing equal access to opportunities.” news.gov.mb.ca
Lexpert, “Mediagrif Acquires BMO MERX Business”: “On December 11, 2002, Mediagrif Interactive Technologies Inc. … purchased BMO Financial Group’s MERX public-sector electronic tendering service business. The purchase price was $6.5 million plus certain performance-based royalty payments payable to BMO.” lexpert.ca
Mediagrif became mdf commerce on 23 September 2020. “mdf commerce Announces Completion of Acquisition by KKR,” 17 May 2024, C$5.80 a share (mccarthy.ca). SOVRA, “Unveiling SOVRA: Rebranding to Better Serve the Public Sector,” 26 August 2024 (sovra.com); SOVRA on MERX as “one of SOVRA’s core supplier-facing platforms” (sovra.com). MERX’s own FAQ still reads “a subsidiary of mdf commerce.” merx.com
Canadian Free Trade Agreement, consolidated text of 27 August 2026, Chapter Five. Article 504.3 sets the thresholds; Article 506.5: “All tender notices shall be available to suppliers free of charge”; Article 506.6(a): each notice shall include how to “obtain all relevant documents relating to the procurement, and their cost and terms of payment, if any”; Article 509.7: “A procuring entity shall make available to suppliers tender documentation that includes all information necessary to permit suppliers to prepare and submit responsive tenders,” including the evaluation criteria and their weighting, technical specifications, warranty and the terms of submission. cfta-alec.ca
MERX, supplier pricing, read 27 October 2026: “Local, $50 / month, billed annually … for one province”; “National, $167 / month, billed annually … for all of Canada”; a Basic tier is free for “participating member agencies” that “have paid for your access.” The yearly figures on this page are twelve times the monthly rates. merx.com. MERX’s FAQ: a Basic subscriber may “pay a one-time access fee,” amount unstated, and pay-as-you-go “is no longer generally available.” merx.com. Buyers who charge through MERX include Metrolinx (“exclusively through MERX, either for a flat, per-opportunity access fee or on an annual membership fee basis,” metrolinx.merx.com); buyers who have prepaid include Winnipeg (“There is no charge to view City of Winnipeg documents on MERX,” winnipeg.ca).
CanadaBuys: “solicitation documents, and other attachments are fully accessible and available free of charge and without having to register” (any tender notice page, canadabuys.canada.ca); open tender notices as a CSV, “refreshed each morning.” open.canada.ca
Ontario Tenders Portal: vendors can view and download opportunities “without incurring a cost.” ontariotenders.app.jaggaer.com
Québec, “Système électronique d’appel d’offres,” updated 31 August 2026: tender documents “ne peuvent être obtenus que par l’intermédiaire du SEAO” (quebec.ca); Ministère de l’Économie, “Procédure d’obtention des documents d’appel d’offres sur SEAO”: order the documents and “le coût s’inscrira selon le mode d’abonnement.” economie.gouv.qc.ca
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Contracting Policy Notice 2025-5: Reciprocity in Federal Procurement, 10 July 2025: announced 19 June 2025; the Interim Policy on Reciprocal Procurement “takes effect on July 14, 2025.” canada.ca

A note on this edition. Prices are MERX’s as published on the date given and will move; the two on this page carry a review date in the site’s source. Five details were corrected against their sources before this edition was published, among them a provincial portal the PDF listed as free; the page’s own record of each is in its source. The same public-domain terms as the site.