Our Business

The Department of Public Works and Government Services Act, passed in 1996, established the Department and set out the legal authorities for PWGSC's services. The Act established PWGSC as a common service organization providing government departments, boards and agencies with support services for their programs that today include:

  • Procurement;
  • Office accommodation and facilities;
  • Architectural and engineering services;
  • Construction, maintenance and repair of public works and federal real property;
  • Pay and pension services;
  • Receiver General, treasury of Canada and accounts administration;
  • Linguistic services;
  • Industrial security screening; and
  • Specialized programs, government-wide applications and greening of government operations.

Our goal is to manage our business in a way that demonstrates integrity, accountability, transparency, and adds value for our client departments and for Canadians. In doing so, PWGSC:

  • Injects more than $14 billion annually into the Canadian economy through government procurement for 140 federal departments and agencies; and processes around 50,000 contracts/amendments annually with 39% of all business volume (excluding military procurement) going to Canadian small and medium enterprises (SMEs);
  • Handles over $2.2 trillion in cash flow transactions through the Receiver General function as treasurer;
  • Issues more than 14 million federal pay and pension payments;
  • Provides accommodation to parliamentarians and more than 272,200 public servants in 7,349,029 m2 in 1,733 locations across Canada;
  • Manages a Crown-owned property portfolio with a market value of $7.3 billion, including 19 engineering assets such as bridges and dams;
  • Makes annual rental payments of $1.207 billion on 1,871 lease contracts across Canada;
  • Manages 27% of the federal real property inventory based on total floor area, second only to National Defence;
  • Provides $515 million in payments in lieu of taxes to 1,246 taxing authorities on behalf of the Government of Canada;
  • Provides translation and interpretation services, annually, for more than 1,700 parliamentary sittings and parliamentary committee meetings, and manages translation for more than one million pages of text on behalf of other federal organizations; and
  • Images and digitizes more than 23 million pages, annually, for federal government departments and agencies.

The portfolio of the Minister of PWGSC includes two Crown Corporations: Canada Lands Company Limited and Defence Construction Canada. It also includes Shared Services Canada, which reports separately. The Office of the Procurement Ombudsman (OPO) also reports to the Minister and operates independently. Details of their operations are provided in separate annual reports that are tabled in Parliament by the Minister.