Canada Federal Corporations

This Actor lists federally incorporated Canadian corporations. The data comes from the official Federal Corporations dataset that Corporations Canada (ISED) publishes on open.canada.ca. The source is updated daily.

What you get (one row per corporation)

Corporation number, business number (BN), English and French names, governing act, status and status detail, incorporation (anniversary) date, last annual filing year, last annual meeting date, city, province, country, the postal FSA (first 3 characters of the postal code), and the minimum and maximum number of directors allowed. Each row also has a url that links to the corporation's public page on Corporations Canada, a link to the source dataset, and the licence line.

What you don't get (on purpose)

• Director names. The source files have none, and this Actor never looks them up.
• Street address lines and full postal codes. For a small company, the registered office is often the owner's home, so these are left out.
• Address details inside the city field. Some source records put a postal code, street address, PO box, rural route, unit number or postal-zone number ("TORONTO 18") in the city/town column. These parts are removed, and the city is left empty when nothing clean remains (about 210 of 1.57 million records).

Names that may belong to individuals (blanked by default)

Some corporate names are a person's name, such as professional corporations ("... Professional Corporation", "Dr. ... Inc.", "... Personal Real Estate Corporation") or companies like "John Samplesmith Holdings Inc." and "Paige Sampleby Photography Inc." (a given name and a surname, then business words or a legal suffix; French names like "Gestion Marco Testblay inc." count too).

What's withheld: by default, the name and nameAlt of these rows are replaced with [redacted: may be an individual]. That's about 2.8% of active corporations (17,905 of 645,463 distinct active CBCA names on Oct 24, 2026). The rest of the row is kept, including the corporation number, business number and url, so you can still look the record up on Corporations Canada. Each row has nameMayBeIndividual (turn off with flagIndividuals: false). Set redactIndividuals: false to get every name unchanged.

This is a name-pattern check, not a lookup. It uses lists of common given names and surnames (US-census lists, public domain, as shipped with zxcvbn) and skips place words. On a fresh random sample of 480 active names, about 0.6% were person-named companies it missed, and about 0.8% were real company names it blanked by mistake (for example "Piscines Tropicana Ltée"). Check the results before relying on them.

Filters

• Active or inactive: active only, inactive/dissolved only, or both.
• Include non-CBCA: also includes not-for-profits, boards of trade, co-ops and similar bodies.
• Province/territory: where the registered office is.
• Status contains: for example Dissolved, Amalgamated, or Dissolution Pending.
• Incorporated on/after and on/before: dates in YYYY-MM-DD format.
• Name contains: matches the English or French name.
• Max corporations: the run stops after this many (default 100, maximum 50,000).
• Fetch all: returns every match, still capped at 50,000 per run. Use filters to split bigger exports.

A bad date or value stops the run right away with a clear message.

How it works (being polite)

The Actor streams the official CSV files once. It doesn't scrape any web pages. It identifies itself honestly with the User-Agent canada-federal-corporations Apify Actor (LOUDTZU). When it needs more than one file, it waits 20 seconds between downloads, as open.canada.ca's robots.txt asks (Crawl-delay: 20). A full active-CBCA file is about 100 MB. It's streamed, not loaded into memory, so the Actor runs in 256 MB.

Pricing

$0.003 per result (pay per event, one result = one corporation), with no start fee. 1,000 corporations cost $3.00.

Licence

Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada (https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada). The source dataset is https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/0032ce54-c5dd-4b66-99a0-320a7b5e99f2. This Actor is not endorsed by the Government of Canada.

Run locally

pip install -r requirements.txt pytest
pytest -q
python -m src   # input in storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json

Word list credit

The English word list used by the name checker comes from SCOWL 2020.12.07, Copyright 2000-2018 Kevin Atkinson and contributors, used under the SCOWL licence (see LICENSES/SCOWL.txt).