Volume I · Spring 2026 · Alberta Lens / civic atlas
$11.12B
Sole-source disclosed contract value · current government · FY 2019–FY 2026
That's the total Alberta paid out in sole-source contracts — contracts awarded without a competitive process — under the current government, fiscal years 2019–20 through 2025–26: 6,547 contracts to 2,662 vendors. The number comes from one of the few Alberta datasets you can actually download as a spreadsheet. The ten chapters that follow are what those downloadable datasets can answer, and where the rest of what Alberta publishes — mostly PDFs and portal-only pages — blocks the question.1
Plate I · Procurement composition · current government
Sole-source vs competitive — what Alberta's data shows, and what it doesn't.
Alberta publishes its sole-source contracts as a downloadable spreadsheet; competitive ones are posted only to the Alberta Purchasing Connection portal, one award at a time, with no way to download the full list. The right cell is the gap.2
Alberta · sole-source
$11.12B
disclosed contract value · 6,547 contracts
Open Alberta — sole-source service contracts. The province publishes a fresh spreadsheet each quarter listing vendor, ministry, dollar amount, and the reason given for not bidding.
1 of 1,004 downloadable Alberta datasets
Alberta · competitive
—
not published in bulk
The Alberta Purchasing Connection (APC) portal posts each award notice as its own page, but doesn't publish a single downloadable file of all awards. So you can't count up how many of Alberta's contracts went out for bids, only the ones that didn't.
Gap · Ch 11 · procurement (tenders & awards)
Plate II · Sole-source contracts disclosed by Alberta, FY 2015–16 to FY 2025–26
The shape of sole-source spend in Alberta.
Yearly disclosed contract totals, fiscal years 2015–16 through 2025–26. The dashed line marks the start of the current government. Multi-year contracts are counted in the year they were signed — read the overall shape, not the yearly ups and downs.2
- FY 15–16: $1.18B
- FY 16–17: $1.34B
- FY 17–18: $3.70B
- FY 18–19: $1.34B
- FY 19–20: $1.02B
- FY 20–21: $2.99B
- FY 21–22: $1.21B
- FY 22–23: $0.54B
- FY 23–24: $3.37B
- FY 24–25: $1.00B
- FY 25–26: $0.99B
Source: Government of Alberta · Open Data Portal · sole-source disclosure tables.
fig. 2.1 · drawn from 15,542 contracts · FY 2015–26
Plate III · Chapter index
The ten chapters, in order.
Each row is a chapter. The right column shows how many of the datasets the chapter would ideally use are publicly available — out of the total it draws on.
| § | Chapter | Datasets public | |
|---|---|---|---|
| §1 | Zombie Recipients Grant recipients with their charity status, registration date, and last-funded year. | 5 / 11 +2 partial | → |
| §2 | Ghost Capacity Sole-source vendors with their disclosed contract totals and available corporate-footprint signals. | 5 / 9 +2 partial | → |
| §3 | Funding Loops Cycles in the CRA T3010 charity-to-charity transfer graph. | 6 / 9 +1 partial | → |
| §4 | Sole Source and Amendment Creep Top sole-source vendors, individual contracts, and a multi-year sole-source spend chart. | 5 / 8 +1 partial | → |
| §5 | Vendor Concentration Vendors ranked by share of provincial contract spend across ministries. | 5 / 8 +1 partial | → |
| §6 | Related Parties and Governance Networks Name matches between MLAs, government appointees, registered lobbyists, and Alberta vendors and recipients. | 3 / 10 +5 partial | → |
| §7 | Policy Misalignment Spending records paired with the publishing ministry's stated mandate text. | 4 / 11 +6 partial | → |
| §8 | Duplicative Funding and Funding Gaps Recipients drawing both provincial grants and federal transfers, with the corresponding disclosure records. | 12 / 22 +8 partial | → |
| §9 | Contract Intelligence Sole-source justification text clustered by recurring language; per-vendor service-description timeseries. | 4 / 9 +3 partial | → |
| §10 | Adverse Media Alberta vendors and recipients named in CanLII court decisions and AER enforcement records. | 5 / 17 +11 partial | → |
§ Editorial
On methodology.
An atlas of what Alberta's published open-data record can and can't answer across the ten accountability questions Agency 2026 puts to provincial government. The disclosed sole-source CSV that anchors this volume is one of about 1,004 machine-readable Alberta datasets — roughly 3% of what the province publishes. Each chapter that follows records what its datasets show, what they don't, and what's missing to close the question.
1The journey is short on paper: read the relevant records from Alberta's open-data catalog and the Alberta Purchasing Connection portal — supplemented where useful by a small number of federal datasets the chapters consume directly, like the CRA T3010 charity returns — link them across vendor names, recipient identifiers, and ministry attribution, and surface what each combination can answer at scale. Chapter 11 (the spine) catalogs which dataset classes are published, in what format, and which are blocked behind portals or PDFs — the basis for the 3% claim above.
2Where the record stops short — an amendment without a parent contract, a justification field left blank, a registry kept behind a portal search — the chapter says so on the page. The atlas records both the answers and the absences. It doesn't rank Alberta against any other jurisdiction.