CanadaBuys Tender Notices Scraper (Canada)

Turns the CanadaBuys open-data CSV feeds published by Public Services and Procurement Canada into one flat JSON record per notice. CanadaBuys is the Government of Canada's authoritative source for federal tender opportunities and contract awards, and it publishes three bulk files a day: every tender still open for bidding, everything published in the last 24 hours, and the fiscal-year award files. This Actor downloads the file you ask for, streams it (they run to tens of megabytes), and gives you the notice with the buying department, the named contact and their email, UNSPSC and GSIN codes, the closing date, the trade agreements, the delivery regions, the attachments, and — on award notices — the winning supplier, the contract value and the contract end date. Filter by publication date, keyword, UNSPSC or GSIN prefix, procurement category, delivery region, buyer and closing date. No API key, no browser automation, no login.

What you get

One record per notice. Every field below exists on every record and is null (or []) where the feed does not publish it, so a CSV or Excel export always has the same columns. Percentages are the share of records carrying a value, measured on 8 September 2026 across the whole open-tender file (945 notices) and the whole 2026-2027 award file (3,331 notices).

Field	Description
id	referenceNumber + - + amendmentNumber, e.g. cb-772-82428859-000. Unique within a run.
source	Always canadabuys.
feed	Which file the record came from: open, new or awards.
url	The notice's page on canadabuys.canada.ca, derived from the reference number (see Limits and freshness for the 2.5% of award references this does not work for).
externalNoticeUrl	The bidding-system link the buyer published (SAP Ariba, MERX, a provincial portal). Present on 46% of open tenders, never on awards.
referenceNumber, amendmentNumber, solicitationNumber, contractNumber	The source's identifiers. solicitationNumber is the one that stays stable between the tender feeds and the award feed. contractNumber is award-only (98%).
title	English title (100%); falls back to the French title if the English cell is ever empty.
description	Notice text with HTML entities decoded and tags stripped, first 5,000 characters. 98% of open tenders, 85% of awards.
noticeType	Request for Proposal, Request for Standing Offer, Advance Contract Award Notice, ... (86% / 96%).
procurementCategory	Array of the source's category codes: GD, SRV, CNST, SRVTGD. A notice can carry more than one.
procurementCategoryNames	The same categories in words: Goods, Services, Construction, Services related to goods.
procurementMethod	Competitive - Open bidding, Competitive - Selective tendering, Advance contract award notice, Non-competitive, ...
selectionCriteria, limitedTenderingReason	How the winner is chosen, and the reason given for limited tendering.
instrumentType, amendmentType	Award-only: Contract, Standing Offer, Supply Arrangement, Contract against SA; Original, Amendment, Termination (66% and 64% of awards).
status	Open on the tender feeds; Active, Expired or Cancelled on awards.
publicationDate	YYYY-MM-DD. This is the field every date filter works on.
amendmentDate	Date of the latest amendment, when the notice has been amended.
closingDate	Bid closing date and time as CanadaBuys publishes it, YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS in Eastern Time — see the note in Limits and freshness. Tender feeds only.
expectedContractStart, expectedContractEnd	The buyer's expected contract dates on a tender notice (56% / 50%).
contractAwardDate, contractStartDate, contractEndDate	Award-only, and near-universal there (100% / 99% / 99%). contractEndDate is what you watch for re-tender timing.
contractAmount, totalContractValue	Award-only numbers in contractCurrency. 72% of awards publish a non-zero figure in at least one of them; many buyers publish 0 rather than disclose.
contractCurrency	CAD (98% of the awards that state one), USD, EUR. Null means CAD, per the source's own documentation.
unspsc, unspscDescription	Arrays of 8-digit UNSPSC codes and their English labels (84% of open tenders, 98% of awards).
gsin, gsinDescription	Arrays of Goods and Services Identification Numbers and their labels. Sparse: 4.8% of open tenders and 0.7% of awards.
tradeAgreements	Array of the trade agreements the procurement falls under (CFTA, CETA, WTO GPA, CPTPP, ...).
regionsOfOpportunity	Array; where bidders may be located. Tender feeds only (42%).
regionsOfDelivery	Array; where the work is delivered (Canada, Ontario (except NCR), National Capital Region (NCR), ...). 86% / 95%.
buyerName	Contracting entity, e.g. Department of Public Works and Government Services (PSPC) (100%).
buyerAddress	The buyer address on one line, plus buyerCity, buyerProvince, buyerPostalCode, buyerCountry split out.
endUserEntities	Array of the departments that will actually use the contract (45% of open tenders, 66% of awards) — often different from the buyer.
supplierName	Award-only: the winning supplier (100% of awards), plus supplierAddress, supplierCity, supplierProvince, supplierCountry.
contactName, contactEmail, contactPhone	The procurement officer named on the notice. contactName 100%, contactEmail 97.5% (open) / 99.3% (awards), contactPhone 42% / 32%.
attachments	Array of attachment URLs (tender documents, annexes, drawings). 42% of open tenders carry at least one; the record with the most on 8 September 2026 had 31.
fetchedAt	ISO timestamp of the run that produced the record.

The dataset ships three views: Overview (date, title, buyer, category, UNSPSC, delivery regions, closing date, link), Buyer contacts (buyer, contact name, email, phone, city, end user) and Awards and suppliers (supplier, city, contract amount, total value, currency, award and end dates).

Records are delivered newest publication date first, so a small maxItems gives you the most recent notices rather than an arbitrary slice of the file.

Input

Input	Type	Default	Description
feed	string	open	open — every notice still open for bidding (about 950 at any time). new — only what was published in the last 24 hours. awards — contract awards, read from the fiscal-year award file(s) your date window touches.
daysBack	integer	7 (open, awards); none for new	Look-back window in days on publicationDate, ending now. Ignored when dateFrom/dateTo are set. Left empty on the new feed it means no date filter at all, which is what you want for a 24-hour file. Max 1830.
dateFrom	string	–	Earliest publication date to keep, YYYY-MM-DD, inclusive. Overrides daysBack.
dateTo	string	today	Latest publication date to keep, YYYY-MM-DD, inclusive.
keywords	string[]	none	Case-insensitive terms matched against the title and description; any match keeps the notice.
unspscPrefixes	string[]	all	UNSPSC codes or prefixes, 2 to 8 digits. 43 = IT and telecom equipment, 81 = engineering and research services, 72 = building and maintenance services, 42 = medical equipment, 25 = vehicles. Any code starting with any prefix keeps the notice.
gsinPrefixes	string[]	all	GSIN codes or prefixes, 1 to 10 letters/digits (N7030, D3). Only 5% of open tenders carry a GSIN, so this is a narrow filter by design.
categories	string[]	all	goods, services, construction, services-related-to-goods (the source's GD, SRV, CNST, SRVTGD codes are also accepted).
regions	string[]	all	Case-insensitive substrings matched against regionsOfDelivery: "Ontario", "Quebec", "National Capital Region", "British Columbia". See the warning below the table.
buyers	string[]	all	Case-insensitive substrings matched against buyerName: "National Defence", "Shared Services Canada", "Parks Canada".
closingAfter	string	–	Keep only tenders closing on or after this YYYY-MM-DD, so you skip notices that are about to close. Tender feeds only — setting it with feed: "awards" fails the run with a clear message rather than returning nothing.
maxItems	integer	500	Stop after this many notices. You are charged per notice delivered, so this is also the cost cap. Records are newest-first, so a value below the number of matches drops the oldest notices in the window.

Example — open IT and engineering tenders from the last two weeks that are still open in three weeks' time:

{
  "feed": "open",
  "daysBack": 14,
  "unspscPrefixes": ["43", "81"],
  "closingAfter": "2026-09-29",
  "maxItems": 500
}

Example — every contract National Defence awarded last month, with the winning suppliers:

{
  "feed": "awards",
  "dateFrom": "2026-08-01",
  "dateTo": "2026-08-31",
  "buyers": ["National Defence"],
  "maxItems": 1000
}

Example — a daily job that returns whatever went up in the last 24 hours, unfiltered:

{ "feed": "new", "maxItems": 200 }

How regions matches. It is a plain substring test on the notice's delivery regions, which are the source's own labels. A nationwide contract is published as Canada and will not match "Ontario", so ask for ["Ontario", "Canada"] if you want both. About one open tender in seven names no delivery region at all and is dropped whenever this filter is set.

Bad input fails fast: an unknown feed, a malformed date, a UNSPSC prefix that is not 2 to 8 digits, an unknown category or closingAfter on the award feed all stop the run with the validation message as its status, before anything is downloaded or charged.

Output example

A real open tender notice from a live run on 8 September 2026 ({"feed":"open","daysBack":7}):

{
  "id": "cb-772-82428859-000",
  "source": "canadabuys",
  "feed": "open",
  "url": "https://canadabuys.canada.ca/en/tender-opportunities/tender-notice/cb-772-82428859",
  "externalNoticeUrl": null,
  "referenceNumber": "cb-772-82428859",
  "amendmentNumber": "000",
  "solicitationNumber": "RFSO SEN-019",
  "contractNumber": null,
  "title": "RFSO Multipurpose Paper & Envelopes",
  "description": "The Senate of Canada (Senate) is seeking an offer to establish a Standing Offer (SO) for Multipurpose Paper and Envelopes as described in Annex “A” - Statement of Requirement (SOR), for a period of three (3) years with the Senate having the option to review for two (2) additional one-year (1) terms.",
  "noticeType": "Request for Standing Offer",
  "procurementCategory": ["GD"],
  "procurementCategoryNames": ["Goods"],
  "procurementMethod": "Competitive - Open bidding",
  "selectionCriteria": "Highest Combined Rating of Technical Merit and Price",
  "limitedTenderingReason": null,
  "instrumentType": null,
  "amendmentType": null,
  "status": "Open",
  "publicationDate": "2026-09-04",
  "amendmentDate": null,
  "closingDate": "2026-09-25T11:00:00",
  "expectedContractStart": "2026-11-01",
  "expectedContractEnd": "2029-10-31",
  "contractAwardDate": null,
  "contractStartDate": null,
  "contractEndDate": null,
  "contractAmount": null,
  "totalContractValue": null,
  "contractCurrency": null,
  "unspsc": ["14111500"],
  "unspscDescription": ["Printing and writing paper"],
  "gsin": [],
  "gsinDescription": [],
  "tradeAgreements": ["None"],
  "regionsOfOpportunity": ["National Capital Region (NCR)"],
  "regionsOfDelivery": ["Ontario (except NCR)"],
  "buyerName": "Senate",
  "buyerAddress": "1500-60 Queen Street, 15 Floor, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0A4, Canada",
  "buyerCity": "Ottawa",
  "buyerProvince": "Ontario",
  "buyerPostalCode": "K1A 0A4",
  "buyerCountry": "Canada",
  "endUserEntities": [],
  "supplierName": null,
  "supplierAddress": null,
  "supplierCity": null,
  "supplierProvince": null,
  "supplierCountry": null,
  "contactName": "Christine Tremblay",
  "contactEmail": "christine.tremblay@SEN.parl.gc.ca",
  "contactPhone": "(613) 995-8888",
  "attachments": [
    "https://canadabuys.canada.ca/sites/default/files/webform/tender_notice/105889/rfso-sen-019-2026-2027-multipurpose-printing-and-specialty-paper-final-1eng.pdf"
  ],
  "fetchedAt": "2026-09-08T02:35:30.780Z"
}

An award notice from the same day ({"feed":"awards","daysBack":14}), fields common to both omitted:

{
  "id": "CW2456624-000",
  "feed": "awards",
  "url": "https://canadabuys.canada.ca/en/tender-opportunities/award-notice/cw2456624",
  "referenceNumber": "CW2456624",
  "solicitationNumber": "WS5742179565",
  "contractNumber": "CW2456624",
  "title": "EQ754-261618 - Long Lake Dam and Little Brother Lake Dam Replacement, Haliburton Ontario",
  "noticeType": "Request for Proposal",
  "procurementCategoryNames": ["Construction"],
  "procurementMethod": "Competitive - Open bidding",
  "instrumentType": "Contract",
  "amendmentType": "Original",
  "status": "Active",
  "publicationDate": "2026-09-04",
  "closingDate": null,
  "contractAwardDate": "2026-09-04",
  "contractStartDate": "2026-09-04",
  "contractEndDate": "2030-11-01",
  "contractAmount": 9857035.2,
  "totalContractValue": 9857035.2,
  "contractCurrency": "CAD",
  "unspsc": ["72141106", "81101507"],
  "unspscDescription": ["Gravel or dirt road construction service", "Dam engineering"],
  "regionsOfDelivery": ["Ontario (except NCR)"],
  "buyerName": "Department of Public Works and Government Services (PSPC)",
  "endUserEntities": ["Department of Public Works and Government Services (PSPC)"],
  "supplierName": "1014968-GDB CONSTRUCTEURS",
  "supplierAddress": "206 Fielding Road, Lively, Ontario, P3Y 1L6, CA",
  "supplierCity": "Lively",
  "supplierProvince": "Ontario",
  "contactName": "Premkumar, Mirunalini (SPAC/PSPC) (elle-la-lui / she-her-hers)",
  "contactEmail": "mirunalini.premkumar@tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca",
  "contactPhone": null
}

The run also writes a SUMMARY record to the key-value store with the counts, the resolved window, which CanadaBuys files were read, how many megabytes each was and when the source last refreshed it, and how many rows each filter rejected.

Pricing

Pay per result: US$0.003 per notice delivered (US$3 per 1,000 notices). You are charged only for records pushed to the dataset, so a run that matches nothing costs nothing. The default run (open, 7 days) returned 123 notices on 8 September 2026 — about US$0.37. Runs on the Apify free plan are additionally limited by the platform's free-tier compute allowance.

Data source and licence

• Open tender notices: https://canadabuys.canada.ca/opendata/pub/openTenderNotice-ouvertAvisAppelOffres.csv
• New tender notices (last 24 hours): https://canadabuys.canada.ca/opendata/pub/newTenderNotice-nouvelAvisAppelOffres.csv
• Award notices, per fiscal year: https://canadabuys.canada.ca/opendata/pub/<fiscal year>-awardNotice-avisAttribution.csv, e.g. 2026-2027-awardNotice-avisAttribution.csv
• Dataset pages: CanadaBuys tender notices and CanadaBuys award notices on the Government of Canada Open Government Portal. Column-by-column reference: the CanadaBuys supporting documentation and data dictionary.
• Publisher: Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), which runs CanadaBuys. Coverage is federal only: Schedule I, II and III departments, agencies and Crown corporations subject to the trade-agreement obligations. Provincial, municipal and MASH notices that appear on the CanadaBuys website are not in these files.
• Licence: Open Government Licence – Canada (https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada), as stated on both dataset pages and read on 8 September 2026. It permits commercial reuse, including redistribution and derivative works, provided you attribute the source. Use the wording the licence asks for: "Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada." Do not suggest that PSPC endorses you or your product.

Personal data. contactName, contactEmail and contactPhone name a real procurement officer, and supplierName / supplierAddress can identify a sole trader. CanadaBuys publishes these deliberately so that suppliers can ask questions about the solicitation, and they are covered by the Open Government Licence, but that is not blanket consent for marketing. If you use these contacts for outreach you are the controller of that processing: Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) governs commercial electronic messages to Canadian recipients and PIPEDA governs the personal information, and both are your responsibility, not the source's or this Actor's.

Limits and freshness

All figures measured on 8 September 2026 unless stated.

• Refresh schedule (from the source's supporting documentation, and matching the Last-Modified headers observed): the new tender notices file is rebuilt every two hours from 06:15 to 22:15 Eastern; all other files, including the open-tender file and the award files, are refreshed once a day between 07:00 and 08:30 Eastern. Observed Last-Modified: open tenders Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:20 GMT, awards 2026-2027 Mon, 07 Sep 2026 09:30 GMT, new tenders Tue, 08 Sep 2026 02:15 GMT. A daily schedule at 14:00 UTC or later always sees that morning's refresh.
• Publication lag. Because the daily files are built in the morning, the newest publication date in them is normally yesterday. Notices published through PSPC's SAP Ariba only enter the files the following day, and award notices coming from the Automated Buyer Environment (ABE) are transferred to CanadaBuys monthly, in the third week of the month — so a very recent ABE award can be up to a month late. Plan for a one-day lag on tenders and up to a month on some awards.
• A short window over a weekend can be empty. With 8 September 2026 as "today", feed: "open" with daysBack: 3 returned zero notices: the newest publication date in that morning's file was Friday 4 September, and Monday 7 September was Labour Day. The default of 7 days exists for exactly this reason; do not go below 5 unless you are happy with empty weekend runs.
• Volumes. Combining the open file and the 2026-2027 tender file, CanadaBuys published a median of 30 federal tender notices per weekday (mean 32, range 19 to 46 over the 25 weekdays from 1 August to 4 September 2026; civic holidays drop to a handful, weekends to 1 or 2). Award notices ran at a median of 23 per weekday (mean 25, range 6 to 50 over those same 25 weekdays) and, unlike tenders, also arrive in weekend batches — 53 on Saturday 29 August, 60 on Saturday 5 September. The 2026-2027 award file held 3,331 notices for 1 April to 5 September. In the default 7-day window the Actor returned 123 open tenders and 178 awards.
• File sizes and run time. One HTTP download per feed file - one for either tender feed, one per fiscal year for awards - streamed and parsed row by row so the file never lands in memory whole. Open tenders 6.5 MB / 945 rows; new tenders a few kilobytes; awards 2026-2027 11.4 MB / 3,331 rows; awards 2025-2026 27.8 MB / 7,848 rows. Measured wall-clock on a home connection: default open run 7.8 s, default award run 11.4 s, an award window straddling 1 April (two files, 39 MB) 31.5 s, a 365-day open window with maxItems: 2000 8.1 s. No rate limit is documented or was observed; a broken download is retried from the start up to three times.
• The open feed is a snapshot, not an archive. It contains only notices still open for bidding today, so asking for dateFrom: "2026-05-01" returns the May notices that have not closed yet, not everything published in May. The 2026-2027 fiscal-year tender file (which this Actor does not read) held 2,574 notices, all of them already Expired or Cancelled. For a complete tender history, use awards for what was bought and treat open as the live pipeline.
• Award windows and fiscal years. Awards are published one file per Government of Canada fiscal year (1 April to 31 March). A window that straddles 1 April downloads both files; a window that starts before 1 April 2022 is clamped, with a warning, because earlier awards are only in the CanadaBuys legacy file. A window entirely before 2022-2023 fails fast.
• Closing times are Eastern local time, not a fixed offset. The source documentation says tenderClosingDate is UTC-05:00, but the CanadaBuys website renders the same value as EDT in summer and EST in winter — checked against four live notice pages on 8 September 2026. The Actor therefore passes the value through unchanged: read it as America/Toronto wall-clock time.
• url is derived, and 2.5% of award references have no page. CanadaBuys builds a notice page alias from the reference number by lower-casing it and dropping every character that is not a letter, digit or hyphen (PW-_NCS-030-11940 → pw-ncs-030-11940, SSC-26-00034774:T → ssc-26-00034774t). Spot-checked on 8 September 2026: 15 of 15 sampled open-tender URLs and 14 of 14 sampled award URLs with plain reference numbers returned HTTP 200, but only 1 of 17 sampled award references containing "/" (the older PSPC contract-number style, 2.5% of the 2026-2027 award file) resolved — the other 16 returned 404. referenceNumber and solicitationNumber are in every record so you can search the site for those.
• Linking a tender to its award. Use solicitationNumber. The source's own documentation warns that referenceNumber is not consistent between the tender and award files.
• Contract values. 72% of awards publish a non-zero contractAmount or totalContractValue; the rest publish 0.00, which means "not disclosed" rather than "free". A null contractCurrency means CAD, per the source. Values are never converted between currencies.
• maxItems truncation. maxItems counts records kept after filtering and the stream is sorted newest-first, so a value below the number of matches drops the oldest notices in the window and logs limitReached: true in the log and the SUMMARY record. Measured on 8 September 2026, an unfiltered award run needs about 200 for 7 days, 450 for 14 and 700 for 30; an unfiltered open-tender run about 130, 280 and 500.
• Deduplication and amendments. Each file carries one row per notice at its current amendment level, so a notice amended three times appears once, with amendmentNumber: "003". Records are de-duplicated on id within a run. Re-running a week later returns the same notice again with a higher amendmentNumber if it changed.
• Bilingual source, English output. Every CanadaBuys column is published in English and French; this Actor emits the English column and falls back to the French one only for title and buyerName when English is missing. Quebec and other French-language notices therefore come through with their French titles intact.
• Safety valve. A run stops reading after 200,000 matching notices and warns; no realistic window reaches that.

Use cases

• Daily bid pipeline. Schedule {"feed": "new"} or {"feed": "open", "daysBack": 2} with your UNSPSC prefixes and delivery regions, and push straight to a CRM or Slack: title, closing date, buying department and the procurement officer's email are all in the record.
• Competitor and incumbent tracking. The award feed names the winning supplier, the contract value and the contractEndDate. Filter buyers or unspscPrefixes to your market, watch who wins, and diarise the re-tender before the incumbent's contract runs out.
• Market sizing and compliance archives. Pull a whole fiscal year of awards by category or department to size a market, or keep a dated archive of every notice a department published for bid-history and audit purposes.

Support

Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Store. Replies within 14 days. Bug reports that name the run id and the input used are fixed fastest.