Montreal Non-Residential Water Metering, After the Cancelled Contract
Montreal awarded a consortium of Dessau and Simard-Beaudry a roughly CA$356M, 25-year contract in late 2007 to meter non-residential buildings and optimise the water network. 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; arbitration then cost Montreal more than CA$13M, which it sued to recover in 2018. The city restarted in 2012 with three smaller contracts worth about CA$55M, and by 2023 had fitted roughly 19,500 industrial, commercial and institutional buildings with remote-read meters. Volumetric billing for those buildings began on 1 January 2023.
About 19,500 non-residential meters were installed over roughly a decade, and volumetric billing started on 1 January 2023. The network they measure has not improved: the city's own data put overconsumption and losses at 30%, the same as in 2015, and its 2021 water-use report rated infrastructure leakage high for the Pierrefonds network and very high for Lachine and Atwater-Charles-J.-Des Baillets. Figures are the City of Montreal's own, reported by Journal Metro in April 2023; the underlying bilan was not directly reachable.
🎓 Lesson
Killing a tainted contract is not the same as abandoning the work. Montreal cancelled a CA$356M, 25-year deal and then bought roughly the same meters for about CA$55M over the following decade — proof the original price was the scandal, not the meters. But the programme stops at non-residential buildings, the readings are withheld from the open data as commercially confidential, and the leakage the 2007 contract was sold to fix sits where it did in 2015.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Cost≈CA$55M for the 2012 relaunch; the cancelled 2007 contract was ≈CA$356M over 25 years
FundingCity of Montreal (Service de l'eau)
Sources
↗ Ville de Montreal — Compteurs d'eauOperator page, the obligation and the data layer: 'Tout batiment destine en partie ou en totalite a un usage non residentiel, qu'il soit existant ou a construire, doit etre muni d'un compteur d'eau.' and 'Ils sont munis d'un systeme de lecture a distance et sont conformes au standard NSF61.' (Every wholly or partly non-residential building, existing or to be built, must have a water meter; the meters have a remote-reading system and meet NSF61.) Also states the Quebec drinking-water strategy target of a 20% cut in production by 2025.
↗ Ville de Montreal — Immeubles non residentiels: tarification volumetrique de l'eauOperator page dating the billing layer: 'Depuis le 1er janvier 2023, les immeubles qui sont en partie ou en totalite destines a un usage non residentiel paient une tarification selon le volume d'eau consomme.' (Since 1 January 2023 non-residential buildings pay by volume consumed.) 2026 rates run from 0 $/m3 below 1,000 m3 to 0,690 $/m3 above 100,000 m3; bills follow the year after the meters are read.
↗ Donnees Montreal — Compteurs d'eau exploites par la Ville de MontrealThe open register, updated monthly: 'Cette liste contient les compteurs d'eau exploites par le Service de l'eau de la Ville de Montreal.' Fields include meter number, diameter, mechanical or electronic type, operating status, address, borough and obfuscated coordinates. The limit is stated on the same page: 'les consommations liees a ces compteurs ne seront pas publiees' (consumption for these meters will not be published), for reasons of industrial confidentiality.
↗ Journal Metro — Compteurs d'eau: Montreal lance un appel d'offres (29 June 2012)The replacement programme and the auditor general's verdict in one piece: three separate contracts for '2900 compteurs d'eau pour les industries, commerces et institutions', 16,200 meters planned by 2018, and 'L'ensemble du projet s'eleve a 55 millions $, assume par les etablissements concernes' (the whole project comes to $55M, borne by the establishments concerned). Context given: the 2009 cancellation of the $356M GENIeau contract, which the auditor general had judged 'trop vite, trop gros et trop cher'.
↗ Journal Metro — Montreal poursuit les acteurs presumes du scandale des compteurs d'eau (2018)The bill and the civil claim: the 2007 award of a $356M contract to the GENIeau consortium, its 2009 termination after the auditor general's report, the 2012 arbitration ordering the city to pay, and a claim of '10,2 M$ en compensation et une penalite de 3,1 M$, plus les frais d'arbitrage et d'experts, pour un total d'un peu plus de 14 M$'. Defendants named: Frank Zampino, Tony Accurso, Paolo Catania, Simard-Beaudry and Groupe SM. The collusion described is an allegation in the city's pleading.
↗ Journal Metro — Montreal, une ville ou coulent encore trop de dollars (22 April 2023)Carries the two current numbers, both attributed to the City's bilan de l'usage de l'eau potable: 'Il aura fallu une dizaine d'annees pour que la Ville de Montreal dote l'ensemble des ICI de compteurs d'eau, pour un total de 19 500 compteurs installes' and 'Les donnees de la Ville de Montreal montrent que le taux de surconsommation et de pertes, qui s'eleve actuellement a 30%, est le meme qu'en 2015.' Also, from the 2021 bilan: 'un IFI eleve pour le reseau de Pierrefonds et tres eleve pour ceux de Lachine et Atwater-Charles-J.-Des Baillets.'
↗ CBC News — Mayor cancels Montreal's $355M water meter contract (2009)The cancellation itself, September 2009: Mayor Gerald Tremblay cancelled the contract after auditor general Jacques Bergeron's report, and dismissed city manager Claude Leger and corporate affairs director Robert Cassius de Linval. Fetch returned 403; outlet, headline and content confirmed through search results, and the year and the causal link are corroborated by the two Journal Metro articles above. La Presse ran the same story on 22 September 2009 ('Tremblay annule le contrat des compteurs d'eau', also 403).
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Montreal Non-Residential Water Metering, After the Cancelled Contract” — Montreal, Canada. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/montreal-water-meters/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
