Canadian Parliament Bills & MPs Scraper

Scrape Canadian federal Parliament data — bills, Members of Parliament and House of Commons votes — straight from openparliament.ca, the open-data mirror of Canada's LEGISinfo and Hansard records. No API key, no login, no cookies.

Pick a mode, optionally pin a parliamentary session (e.g. 45-1), and get one clean row per bill, MP or vote, ready for JSON, CSV, Excel or a direct API pull into your own database.

---

What you get

Mode: bills

Every federal bill (Commons C- and Senate S- bills) with its legislative status:

Field	Example
bill_number	C-3
session	45-1
legisinfo_id	13546143
name	An Act to amend the Citizenship Act (2025)
name_fr	Loi modifiant la Loi sur la citoyenneté (2025)
short_title	Citizenship Act amendment
status	Law (royal assent given)
home_chamber	House
introduced	2025-06-05
is_law	true
is_private_member_bill	false
sponsor_url / sponsor_name	https://openparliament.ca/politicians/lena-metlege-diab/ / Lena Metlege Diab
text_url, vote_count, url	full bill text, number of recorded votes, public page

Mode: politicians

Current MPs with name, given_name, family_name, party, riding, province, gender, image_url and url.

Mode: votes

Recorded divisions in the House of Commons with vote_number, date, description, result, yea_total, nay_total, paired_total, total_votes (yea + nay), a passed boolean and the linked bill_url.

Every record also carries type, source (openparliament) and scraped_at.

---

Input

{
  "mode": "bills",
  "session": "45-1",
  "maxItems": 200
}

Input	Type	Default	Notes
mode	select	bills	bills, politicians or votes
session	string	(empty)	parliament-session, e.g. 45-1, 44-1. Empty = all sessions
maxItems	integer	200	1 – 2000 records

---

Pricing

Runs on the 512 MB memory setting and is pure JSON API traffic — no browser, no proxy required. Expect roughly $0.5 per 1,000 records in Apify platform usage. Votes are the cheapest mode (one request per 100 records); bills and MPs add one detail request per record to fill in status, sponsor, gender and name parts.

---

Use cases

• Civic tech — power a "what is Parliament doing" dashboard, bot or newsletter with live bill statuses.
• Policy monitoring — watch a session for bills reaching royal assent, second reading or committee.
• Lobbying research — map sponsors, private member bills and vote margins by party and riding.
• Journalism — pull vote splits (yea/nay/paired) for a story in seconds instead of scraping Hansard PDFs.
• Academic & data science — build historical legislative datasets going back decades.

---

Notes on the data source

openparliament.ca offers a free, key-less API but asks every automated client to identify itself with a contact User-Agent. This actor always sends apify-actor/1.0 (daniello@biwo-bauwelt.com) and throttles requests (~0.3 s between calls) so the volunteer-run service is never hammered. Data originates from the Parliament of Canada (LEGISinfo, House of Commons Hansard) and is republished by openparliament.ca; check their terms before commercial redistribution.

The API returns bilingual language dictionaries ({"en": ..., "fr": ...}) for titles, statuses and vote descriptions. This actor flattens them to plain English strings (with name_fr kept for bills), so you never see a raw {'en': ...} blob in your dataset.

---

Related actors

• Federal Register Scraper — US federal rules and notices
• USAspending Scraper — US federal award and contract data
• EU Open Data Scraper — EU institutional open datasets
• UK Police Scraper — UK street-level crime and policing data

---

Local development

pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m src.main
python tests/test_mapping.py   # offline, no third-party deps

Keywords: Canadian Parliament scraper, openparliament.ca API, Canada bills scraper, Canadian MP data, House of Commons votes, LEGISinfo scraper, Canadian legislation API, parliament open data, civic tech Canada, policy monitoring Canada.