CFTA Procurement Thresholds: When a Canadian Buyer Must Tender Openly

Almost every argument about whether a Canadian public purchase has to be tendered openly comes down to a single number, and to whether the person asking has valued the procurement correctly. Get the number right and the process follows. Get it wrong and you are exposed on a challenge months later, when the file is cold and the reasoning is nobody's clear memory.

This is what the Canadian Free Trade Agreement thresholds are, what they currently sit at, and — the part that trips people up more often than the figures — how to value a procurement against them.

What the CFTA actually obliges

The Canadian Free Trade Agreement is an internal trade agreement among the federal, provincial and territorial governments. Its procurement chapter exists to stop public buyers from favouring local suppliers, and it does that by requiring that a covered procurement be conducted through an open, competitive process advertised on an electronic tendering system.

Whether a procurement is covered turns on three things: who is buying, what is being bought, and how much it is worth. The thresholds answer the third.

The current thresholds

These values are set by CFTA Article 504.3 and adjusted every two years against Statistics Canada's Industrial Product Price Index. The figures below are in Canadian dollars and are in force from January 1, 2026 through December 31, 2027.

• Departments, ministries and agencies (federal, provincial and territorial departments, ministries, agencies, boards, councils, committees and commissions): $34,700 for goods; $139,000 for services; $139,000 for construction.
• MASH sector (municipalities and municipal organizations, school boards, and publicly funded academic, health and social service entities): $139,000 for goods or services; $347,400 for construction.
• Crown corporations and government enterprises: $694,700 for goods or services; $6,943,900 for construction.

At or above the applicable figure, the procurement must be openly tendered. Below it, the CFTA does not compel an open process — though your own procurement bylaw or policy very often does, at a lower number.

How to value a procurement — where it goes wrong

The threshold applies to the estimated total value of the procurement, and 'total' is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

1. Include the full contract term, not the first year. A three-year service contract at $60,000 a year is a $180,000 procurement.
2. Include option and renewal periods if you intend to be able to exercise them. A two-year contract with three one-year options is a five-year value.
3. Do not split a requirement to stay under the line. Splitting one requirement into several smaller purchases to avoid an open process is contract splitting, and it is the single most common finding in a procurement audit.
4. Aggregate recurring purchases of the same thing. Buying the same commodity from the same supplier eleven times a year is one procurement wearing a disguise.
5. Exclude taxes, include everything else — options, extensions, and any premium or fee payable under the contract.

When the value genuinely cannot be estimated with confidence, the safe answer is to run the open process. An unnecessary open tender costs you time. A missing one costs you the award.

CFTA is not the only agreement in play

A single procurement can be covered by more than one trade agreement at once, each with its own thresholds and its own rules — CETA for Canada-EU coverage, the CPTPP, and the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement among them. Their thresholds are generally higher than the CFTA's, and their obligations are not identical.

The practical consequence: the CFTA threshold tells you the lowest value at which an open process becomes mandatory, but clearing it is not the end of the analysis. If an international agreement also applies, minimum tendering periods and other obligations may be longer or stricter than what the CFTA alone requires.

What 'openly tendered' actually requires

Posting a notice is the visible part. The obligations that get tested in a challenge are the ones around fairness of process:

• The notice goes on an electronic tendering system suppliers can reach, for a reasonable period.
• Evaluation criteria and their relative importance are published before submissions close, not settled afterwards.
• Any clarification or change reaches every interested supplier at the same time, as a formal addendum.
• Submissions stay sealed until close, and late submissions are treated consistently.
• The award is made against the published criteria, and the reasoning is recorded well enough to be reconstructed later.

That last point is the one that decides most disputes. A defensible file is not one where nothing went wrong; it is one where every decision has a date, an author and a stated reason.

When a supplier challenges

For federal procurements, a supplier can file a complaint with the Canadian International Trade Tribunal, which reviews the process against the applicable trade agreements and can recommend remedies including re-evaluation, re-tendering or compensation. Timelines are short and unforgiving.

Outside the federal level, the route differs by jurisdiction — internal review procedures, the CFTA's own dispute mechanism, or the courts under the Canadian tendering law that treats a compliant bid as creating a contractual relationship in itself. In every route, the evidence that matters is the same: the published criteria, the addenda, the scoring record and the audit trail.

A short checklist

1. Identify which entity type you are — department, MASH, or Crown corporation. The thresholds differ sharply.
2. Estimate total value across the full term, including options and renewals.
3. Check your own bylaw or policy threshold, which is usually lower.
4. Check whether an international agreement also applies.
5. If covered: publish the criteria before close, issue changes as addenda to everyone, keep submissions sealed, and record the scoring.
6. Retain the file for the period your records retention schedule requires — challenges do not arrive quickly.

The figures above are current for 2026–2027 and are published by the Internal Trade Secretariat. They change on a two-year cycle, so confirm them at the source before relying on them for a specific procurement. This article is general information, not legal advice.