🍁 Canada Open Data Catalog Scraper

🚀 Export the Canadian federal open data catalog in seconds. Pull 36,000+ datasets across every federal department with metadata, downloadable resources, organization, license, and update history. No API key, no scraping pipeline, no manual CSV stitching.

The Canada Open Data Scraper taps the official open.canada.ca catalog and returns 13 structured fields per dataset, including title, description, organization, license, file resources (CSV, GeoJSON, XLSX, ZIP, etc.), tags, and creation/modification timestamps. The underlying portal is the federal government's flagship open data initiative and aggregates publications from Statistics Canada, Health Canada, Environment Canada, Transport Canada, Natural Resources Canada, and 100+ other departments and agencies.

The catalog covers federal datasets across every Canadian ministry, with bilingual English and French metadata, downloadable file resources, and consistent licensing fields. This Actor turns it into a clean dataset downloadable as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML in under a minute. Filters and pagination run server-side, so you skip the parser engineering entirely.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Canadian SMEs, civic-tech builders, researchers, journalists, GIS engineers, policy analysts, NGOs	Open-data discovery, federal dataset inventory, license auditing, journalism research, GIS source feeds, ML training data

📋 What the Canada Open Data Scraper does

Two collection workflows in a single run:

• 🍁 Catalog walk. Paginate the full federal dataset registry, optionally filtered by a search query.
• 🎯 Single dataset fetch. Retrieve one dataset by UUID or slug for targeted enrichment.
• 📁 Resource expansion. Every dataset includes its file resources with name, format, URL, language, size, and last-modified timestamp.
• 🏷️ Tag and keyword merge. English and French tags consolidated into one deduplicated list.
• 🏛️ Organization attribution. Publishing department or agency captured for every record.

Each record includes identifiers (UUID, slug), descriptive metadata (title, notes, tags), governance (organization, license, frequency), and a full list of downloadable resources.

💡 Why it matters: Canada's open data portal is a goldmine of free, high-trust data, but the portal UI is built for browsing one dataset at a time. This Actor turns it into a single downloadable spreadsheet so you can audit license terms, sort by recency, or build a research inventory in minutes.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: frequency, id, license, metadataCreated, metadataModified, name, notes, organization, portalUrl, resources, resourcesCount, scrapedAt, tags, title. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the Canada Open Data Catalog Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick catalog mode for a full walk or dataset mode with an ID, plus maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

🔗 Recommended Actors

• 🇦🇺 Australia Open Data Scraper - data.gov.au federal, state, and territory dataset catalog
• 🏛️ FAA Aircraft Registry Scraper - U.S. civil aircraft registrations and owners
• 📈 Indexmundi Scraper - Global demographic and economic indicators
• 🗺️ Nominatim OSM Scraper - Geocode addresses via OpenStreetMap
• ✈️ OurAirports Scraper - Global airport, heliport, and airfield dataset

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Government of Canada or any federal department or agency. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open government data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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