Montreal

The 2000s ended in a procurement scandal that still frames the city's reputation. Montreal awarded a consortium roughly CA$356M over 25 years in late 2007 to meter its non-residential buildings; Auditor General Jacques Bergeron judged the tender 'trop vite, trop gros et trop cher' — too fast, too big, too expensive — and the city cancelled it in September 2009, then paid more than CA$13M in arbitration and sued in 2018 to get it back. The instructive part is what came next: Montreal restarted in 2012 with three contracts worth about CA$55M and by 2023 had fitted some 19,500 buildings with remote-read meters. The price had been the scandal, not the meters. But the leakage the original contract was sold to fix has not moved — the city's own data still puts overconsumption and losses at 30 percent, exactly where they were in 2015.

Meanwhile the city was building the habits that now distinguish it. 311 opened in 2007, though handling requests is a borough power, so one number fronts up to nineteen back offices — and the auditor general later found the boroughs had no mechanism to analyse why requests recur, and that elected officials pulled constituents' problems out of the queue ahead of scheduled work. The data portal followed in the early 2010s, and in February 2014 a council resolution adopted plain Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — the unmodified international deed, chosen expressly to avoid adding another licence to the world. A policy overhauled in December 2015 committed the city to publishing by default and to inventorying what it holds, and that inventory is still maintained today.

BIXI is the city's clearest case of the ownership question answered the hard way. It launched in May 2009 with 3,000 bikes on modular stations that needed no excavation, and Montreal-built equipment was then sold to London, Toronto, New York, Boston and Washington. The auditor general found in 2011 that the city had launched with no business plan, no serious feasibility study and arguably no legal authority; the maker went bankrupt in January 2014 owing about CA$50M. Montreal bought the local assets for CA$11.9M and created a non-profit to run them — the opposite of Copenhagen, where the same kind of insolvency killed the system outright. Two other data layers date from these years: GPS on the snow fleet from December 2014, and the OPUS card, in service since 2008.

Since 2017 the region has been reorganising who decides. A new regional authority, the ARTM, took over the fare system and replaced 17 inherited fare grids and more than 750 fare products with four zones between 2021 and 2023 — but riders still cannot tap an ordinary bank card, except on ten suburban bus lines where a pilot has run since December 2024. And the REM opened in July 2023: a genuinely driverless metro, built and owned by CDPQ Infra, the pension fund's infrastructure arm. Quebec's Auditor General reported in November 2024 that the province's contributions will supply more than half of the ridership revenue the REM collects over its operating life, and that on CDPQ Infra's own projections Quebec would begin earning a return on its equity in about 25 years.