Federal Sole Source Watch

Under the Government Contracts Regulations and applicable trade agreements, federal departments can award contracts non-competitively only by invoking a specific exception: Exclusive Rights, Extreme Urgency, Additional Deliveries, Commodity-Market Goods, etc. Every such contract carries the `limitedTenderingReason` field in CanadaBuys' Contract History feed. This product extracts every federally-awarded sole-source / limited- tender contract for vendors in a target metro and ships a curated weekly Excel with three tabs: 1. Active Lock-Ins — contracts still open (Status == "Active") with a limited-tendering reason. The named vendor has a competition- free incumbency that ends when the contract ends. 2. Recent Awards — sole-source contracts awarded in the last 12 months. Track who's winning non-competitive work right now. 3. Vendors With Lock-In — vendor-level rollup. Which firms have multiple sole-source contracts and how much aggregate $. Audience and value (highest-margin slice of federal-contract intel): - Competitive challengers who lost on a sole-source: ammo to file ATIP requests, lobby for re-procurement, or pre-position for re-tender - M&A advisors and business brokers — vendors with sole-source lock-in are exceptionally valuable acquisition targets (sticky revenue, barriers to entry already established) - Federal-procurement consultants positioning the "compete for the re-tender" play - Trade-association researchers writing competitive-procurement advocacy positions

Not every sole-source is unfair — some are completely legitimate (proprietary IP, urgent operational continuity). But the existence of a limited-tender reason is BY ITSELF a high-value signal for everyone who cares about federal procurement: the buyer either has a lock-in problem to solve or an asset to defend. The product surfaces the field; how the buyer interprets it is up to them. Source (free, monthly): https://canadabuys.canada.ca/opendata/pub/contractHistoryComplete-contratsOctroyesComplet.csv (CKAN dataset 4fe645a1-ffcd-40c1-9385-2c771be956a4, P1M) Output: deliverables/specialty/Federal_Sole_Source_Watch_<CITY>_<DATE>.xlsx + .csv