Governments have considerable discretion over procurement including determining when procurement occurs and the terms under which it will take place. But there are few quantitative, large-scale, studies that explore whether procurement occurs when it benefits the government of the day. We provide a descriptive analysis of Canadian federal procurement from 2004 to 2025. We model the pattern of awards in the period outside the year before an election and then compare that model’s forecasts for the number and value of awards in the year leading up to an election. We do not find evidence that Canadian federal governments change their pattern of awards in the year leading up to an election. Our paper introduces a dataset that can be used to monitor Canadian procurement, improves understanding of the politicization of public spending, and establishes a baseline for future causal investigations into how electoral timing shapes Canadian government spending.