From the Montreal Gazette:
The city of Montreal contracts $1.5 billion in goods and services a year, so the public should be able to track where all that money goes.
That’s what we here at The Gazette believe, so we built an online database of municipal contracts to provide the public with a gateway to the information.
Otherwise, Montrealers would have to browse through dozens of city executive committee resolutions that are posted on the city’s website after each weekly executive committee meeting and pick out any contracts that were awarded. And since only an image of the resolution is posted on the website, with no searchable database, it’s impossible to answer such simple questions as “How many municipal contracts has Company X received?”