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← The public record

Public money

$1.16 million, one contract, no vote.

The City of Ottawa has committed $1,157,794 since 2023 to the Montreal company that makes the Transit app, on a single contract. There was no request for proposals. It was sole-sourced under an exception in the Procurement By-law and signed by staff under delegated authority, so it never went to council for a vote.

Contract
33523-92002-G01
Vendor
9280-0366 Quebec Inc., doing business as Transit
Committed since 2023
$1,157,794

What the disclosures show

Each amount below appears in a document the City published. The link beside it opens that document.

AmountWhat it was forDisclosedSource
$282,000Monitoring the real-time data feed2023PDF
$180,000Rolling out the free Royale subscription2023PDF
$462,000Extending the app, surveys, data-quality analysis and performance work2024PDF
$233,794Rider surveys inside the app2025PDF
$1,157,794Committed since 2023

In the City’s tables the vendor appears as DBA TRANSIT (9280-0366 QUEBEC INC.).

What the disclosures do not say

  • Royale is a subscription product. The disclosures do not say whether the $180,000 is a one-time cost or an annual one.
  • They do not say whether it is priced per rider or as a flat fee.
  • They do not publish the term of the contract, so there is no way to know what period the money buys.
  • At the app’s advertised price of $24.99 a year, $180,000 covers roughly 7,200 subscriptions. Ottawa has a population of about one million.

These are not rhetorical questions. Without the term and the pricing structure, a resident cannot tell what was bought, and neither can a councillor.

Across the river, the same app is free

When Gatineau’s STO launched real-time tracking in the Transit app in 2019, its president said publicly that the partnership cost nothing. Showing an agency’s buses is the app’s free tier. What Ottawa paid for is the extras: monitoring the quality of the City’s own data feed, sponsoring a premium subscription, and buying crowdsourced rider surveys.

To be clear

No rule appears to have been broken. Sole-sourcing is permitted under the Procurement By-law, and delegated authority is a real power that staff hold. The argument here is narrower and simpler: a decision this size about how riders get their information should have been debated in the open, and it was not.

What is being asked of candidates

  1. A public review of this contract at Transit Commission, its full cost, term, pricing structure, and performance, before it is extended again.
  2. Open, competitive processes for rider-facing transit technology from now on.
  3. An open partnership framework so that transit platforms built in Ottawa can integrate with OC Transpo and share crowdsourced data back with the City.

A disclosure of our own

The third ask could benefit this site, which is why it is written down here rather than left implied. Before writing to any sitting councillor, the Integrity Commissioner’s office was asked how to do this properly, every one of those communications is being shared with that office, and registration in the City’s Lobbyist Registry will follow if the office confirms it is required.

A version you can send

There is a resident version of this letter with only the first two asks and nothing about this site. It takes about two minutes to send to your own candidates.

Open the resident letter

Corrections to this page

  • September 10, 2026

    This page and the letter sent to 101 candidates said the City had committed close to $700,000. That was wrong. A $462,000 extension in the July to December 2024 disclosure was missed, and the correct total is $1,157,794. The missing payment was found by Jenna Jessop, a candidate in Orléans West-Innes, who read the City disclosures after being written to and asked about it. The figure is corrected everywhere it appeared.

Sources

Every document cited on this page, in full, so that any figure here can be checked against the original.