Three pieces of government spending — $1.90B of public money — put to Canada's vote.
A family-owned Alberta firm landed a federal contract to clean ventilation ducts at the fighter base in its own hometown — and on the evidence, it checks out.
Every building breathes. Hospitals, schools, office towers, military bases — they all push air through metal ducts, and every so often somebody has to climb in and clean them out. On 1 August 2022, the federal government paid for exactly that.
The Department of Public Works and Government Services — PSPC, the government's in-house landlord and buyer — signed a $68,906.25 service contract with Champion Furnace Cleaning Ltd. The job, listed on the file as "W6895-210078 — Duct Cleaning Services 2," was HVAC duct cleaning.
Champion Furnace Cleaning is not a Bay Street consultancy. It's a family-owned outfit based in Alberta's Lakeland region, with offices in Mallaig and Cold Lake, and it has been cleaning furnaces and ducts for residential, commercial and industrial customers since 2003. The Better Business Bureau gives it an A+ rating, though the company is not BBB-accredited.
Here's the part that explains the contract. That "W6895" code at the front of the file number isn't random. PSPC uses the W6895 procurement series for facility-support work it buys on behalf of the Department of National Defence at 4 Wing CFB Cold Lake, the fighter base in northeastern Alberta. Other contracts in the same series have covered piping-system maintenance and underground-utilities repair — the unglamorous plumbing of keeping a military base running.
So this is a duct-cleaning company headquartered in Cold Lake, hired to clean ducts at the air force base in Cold Lake. The local specialist got the local job.
That matters, because it's the kind of detail that separates routine spending from the stuff worth shouting about. Federal buildings genuinely need their ventilation cleaned — dust and debris build up in ductwork, and on a base full of hangars, barracks and offices there is a lot of ductwork. The vendor does precisely this for a living, in precisely this community. The dollar figure is modest by federal standards. None of the usual red flags — a mystery vendor, a wild markup, a company nowhere near the work — show up here.
What does $68,906.25 actually buy? In plain terms, it's in the range of a down payment on a modest home, or well over a year of rent for a family — real money to a household, a rounding error in a federal budget that runs to hundreds of billions.
And that's the honest verdict on this one: it looks like what it says it is. A government building needed cleaning, a qualified local company did the cleaning, and the price tag is in line with the work.
But "looks routine" is not the same as "fully visible." The public record gives us the what, the who and the how much. It doesn't tell us whether the job went to open tender, or how many other firms bid — or whether "Duct Cleaning Services 2" means there was a "Duct Cleaning Services 1," and what that one cost.
When a contract looks this ordinary, the question stops being whether it's a scandal and becomes something quieter: how would we ever know if it weren't?
Public Services and Procurement Canada pays facilities giant BGIS roughly $1.89 billion to operate the government's Crown-owned real estate — a routine outsourcing deal at an extraordinary scale.
The Government of Canada owns a sprawling estate of office towers, laboratories and Crown buildings. It does not, as a rule, change their lightbulbs.
That job goes to contractors. On November 7, 2014, Public Services and Procurement Canada handed one of the largest such jobs in the country to BGIS Global Integrated Solutions Canada. The price: roughly $1.89 billion.
Be clear about what this is. Not a grant, not a one-off purchase, but a long-running service contract. PSPC files it under the wonderfully vague heading "other professional services not elsewhere specified." In plainer terms, it is the deal that keeps the furnaces running, the elevators moving and the roofs from leaking across federal real estate.
BGIS is not a household name, but it is a giant. Headquartered in Markham, Ontario, it manages more than 50,000 facilities worldwide and employs over 10,000 people. PSPC uses it as the contracted provider under an arrangement it calls RP-1 — its Real Property Services contract for Crown-owned federal buildings. The department describes RP-1 as its single largest real property services contract, organized region by region and running into 2028.
So, $1.89 billion to operate the federal government's buildings. Is that a scandal? On its face, no. The work is real, the buildings are real, and a portfolio that size genuinely costs money to run. The contract was competitively sourced — companies bid for it — and it is proactively disclosed, which is the only reason anyone gets to read about it. This is the system working roughly as designed.
But scale invites scrutiny, and a couple of details are worth sitting with.
First, the number is not frozen. PSPC's own records note the contract "includes one or more amendments" — the bureaucratic phrase for a deal topped up or extended since it was first signed. Contracts that start large and grow are common in facilities management. They are also where costs quietly compound.
Second, the ownership has changed hands. When the contract was awarded in 2014, BGIS — then Brookfield Global Integrated Solutions — sat inside Brookfield Asset Management, a Canadian investment giant. In 2019 it was sold to CCMP Capital Advisors, a U.S. private equity firm. The contract to operate Canadian government buildings did not move. The returns from operating them now flow to American owners.
None of this is hidden, and none of it is, by itself, wrong. Outsourcing building management is standard practice for organizations far smaller than the Government of Canada, and the competitive process is the safeguard taxpayers are meant to rely on.
The open question is not whether the work needs doing. It is whether $1.89 billion, amended over more than a decade, still represents the sharpest deal Ottawa could get — and whether anyone outside PSPC is checking.
The contract is filed under a generic category label, its price grew through amendments, and Ottawasted couldn't find it in the public contracts database.
Most of the time, when the federal government buys digital-forensics gear, the bill runs into the tens of thousands of dollars. A forensic workstation here. A software renewal there. The kind of line item that barely registers.
Then there's this one: $9,431,680.83, awarded by Shared Services Canada to Teel Technologies Canada Inc.
Teel is a digital-forensics company. Founded in 2013, it runs laboratories in Victoria and Toronto and sells mobile- and computer-forensic tools, training and examination services to police forces, the military, and federal and provincial agencies. The company says it holds federal "Protected B" security status — the kind of clearance you need to handle sensitive government material. This is the corner of the procurement world where investigators pull data off seized phones and laptops.
The contract's official description is "License/Maintenance fees for Client Software related to Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)." If that sentence tells you nothing, that's because it isn't meant to. "Distributed Computing Environment" is a generic federal procurement category label, not a description of what was actually bought. Teel's other federal purchases sit under the exact same wording — and those turn out to be things like a forensic workstation for the Privy Council Office and a renewal of FTK forensic software for Library and Archives Canada. The label is a filing drawer, not a receipt.
So the reasonable read is that this $9.4-million deal is also forensic hardware, software licences and maintenance, bought through Shared Services Canada, the federal government's central IT buyer. Teel holds call-ups and contracts against standing offers set up through that organization — a routine way for Ottawa to purchase specialized tech.
What isn't routine is the size. Every individually listed Teel Technologies federal contract found during research was valued in the tens of thousands of dollars. This one is valued in the millions — and the file notes it "includes one or more amendments," meaning the price grew after the deal was first signed.
There's one more wrinkle. Ottawasted went looking for this specific contract in the Government of Canada's open contracts database — the public ledger where deals over $10,000 are supposed to appear — and could not find it. Not the entry, not the May 30, 2025 award date, not the contract type. The record we're working from exists; the public-facing copy wasn't where you'd expect it.
None of that means anything is wrong. Amendments are normal. Multi-year software licensing and maintenance for a whole department can legitimately run into seven figures. And this contract was competitively sourced — the process working as designed.
But it does leave a curious reader with a fair question. When a vendor's public paper trail is a string of tens-of-thousands-dollar deals, and then one nine-million-dollar contract appears under a category label that explains nothing, how is a Canadian supposed to tell whether they got their money's worth?
Three contracts crossed our desk today, and not a villain among them. A local Alberta firm cleaned the air ducts at the air base in its own town. A Markham facilities giant keeps the lights on across the federal government's real estate. A forensics company sold Ottawa the tools to pull data off seized devices. The work is real, the vendors are real, and on the evidence each looks like what it says it is.
So why do we still feel uneasy?
Because today's edition is not about scandal. It is about visibility — and how little of it the public record actually offers our readers.
Look at the common thread. All three are the unglamorous machinery of running a government: ducts, buildings, IT systems. This is where a great deal of public money quietly goes — not to ribbon-cuttings, but to maintenance and service contracts most Canadians will never hear about. And it travels there through a system that faithfully records the what, the who and the how much, then stops short of the thing that matters most.
Notice the pattern in the gaps. The Cold Lake file is labelled "Duct Cleaning Services 2" — and nobody outside the department can say what "1" cost. The BGIS deal, $1.89 billion and climbing, "includes one or more amendments." So does the $9.4-million Teel contract — and that one we could not even find in the public database where deals over $10,000 are supposed to appear.
Two of the three contracts grew after they were signed. One hid behind a category label — "Distributed Computing Environment" — that, by design, tells a reader nothing. The cheapest of the three was the most transparent. That should not be a coincidence.
This is how spending stays defensible without ever becoming clear. Each contract clears the bar: competitively sourced, proactively disclosed, the system working as designed. And yet a citizen who simply wants to know whether Ottawa got its money's worth — on $1.89 billion, on $9.4 million, on $68,906 — still cannot tell.
That is the honest verdict on May 13. Not "they are robbing us." Something quieter and more corrosive: we are paying, in full and on time, for things we are not fully allowed to see.
Which leaves the question the whole day keeps circling. When a contract looks perfectly ordinary, how would any of us ever know if it weren't?
Tomorrow, we go looking again.