Canada Building Permits Scraper — Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Montréal

Fresh building permits from five of Canada's largest construction markets in one normalized feed — who just got a permit, for what work, at which address, and at what project value. Built exclusively on official municipal open data: City of Toronto (refreshed daily), City of Vancouver, City of Calgary, City of Edmonton and Ville de Montréal. No proxies, no blocks, no login.

Who uses this data

• Contractors & trades (roofing, HVAC, solar, electrical, landscaping): a new permit at an address = a homeowner or GC actively spending on that property. Filter by keyword ("roof", "solar", "pool") and get a lead list with addresses.
• Building-material suppliers & equipment rental: target active job sites by neighbourhood and project value.
• Market researchers & PropTech: construction activity by city, community and month; project values; housing units.
• Real estate investors: renovation and development signals street by street.

What you get

One clean schema across all cities: permit number, city, status, permit type/class, work class, description, address, community, applicant, contractor name (Calgary/Vancouver), estimated project value in CAD, housing units, applied/issued/completed dates, coordinates (where provided), source.

Built for monitoring

Enable Incremental mode and schedule the Actor daily or weekly — each run returns only permits you haven't seen before. Your sales team gets a fresh lead list every Monday; you only pay for new records.

Contractor names & project value

For Calgary and Vancouver, permits include the contractor name straight from the city's open data — so you see who's doing the job, not just the address. Ideal for suppliers selling to builders, subcontractors chasing work, and competitive intel on who's active in a market.

Records also carry estimated project value, square footage, and housing-unit counts where the city publishes them (including Edmonton) — so you can score and prioritize the biggest jobs first.

Note: some cities also expose an applicant name; where that is a private individual (a homeowner) we keep it out of the default view. The contractor field is a business.

Input example — roofing leads in Calgary, $20k+ projects

{
    "cities": ["calgary"],
    "issuedWithinDays": 14,
    "keywords": ["roof"],
    "minProjectValue": 20000,
    "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
    "maxResults": 500
}

Output example

{
    "permitId": "BP2026-11223",
    "city": "Calgary",
    "province": "AB",
    "status": "Issued",
    "permitType": "Single Construction Permit",
    "workClass": "Alteration",
    "description": "REROOF, SOLAR PV INSTALLATION",
    "address": "248 SADDLELAKE DR NE",
    "community": "SADDLE RIDGE",
    "contractor": "ACME ROOFING LTD",
    "projectValue": 46089.8,
    "issuedDate": "2026-06-28",
    "latitude": 51.1273,
    "longitude": -113.9341,
    "source": "calgary-open-data",
    "country": "CA"
}

FAQ

How fresh is the data? Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Montreal refresh daily or near-daily. Calgary's open dataset can lag by a few weeks - the Actor returns whatever the city has published (use a 60+ day window for Calgary).

Is this legal? Yes — all five sources are official municipal open-data programs published for reuse.

More cities? Open an issue to vote for the next one.

How do I get permit leads without coding? Press Run — the default input returns recent permits across all five cities as a table you can export to Excel or CSV.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

This Actor works as a tool for AI agents via the Apify MCP server. Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible agent can pull fresh Canadian building permits on demand — e.g. "find all permits over $1M issued in Toronto this week".

Add this to your MCP client configuration (Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=truenorthdata/canada-building-permits"
    }
  }
}

On first connection you'll sign in to Apify via OAuth. Your agent can then call the Actor with any input this README describes. Works with agentic payments (x402/Skyfire) too.

Use in Clay and n8n (no code)

Plug building-permit activity straight into the tools your team already uses.

Clay — add a source → Import from Apify Actor → search canada-building-permits → set your input (cities, date window). Turn on auto-update to append new permits as rows, then enrich the contractors/applicants with email and LinkedIn.

n8n — add the official Apify node (@apify/n8n-nodes-apify): Run Actor on truenorthdata/canada-building-permits, then Get Dataset Items, and route to Google Sheets, a CRM, or a Slack alert. Add a Schedule trigger for a running feed of new permits.

Ready-made n8n template

Don't want to wire it up yourself? Import our ready-made n8n workflow — it pulls fresh permits every week, filters to your trade and minimum project value, and appends them to a Google Sheet (or your CRM), deduped automatically.

→ Copy-paste import + setup: Two free n8n templates for Canadian B2B lead lists

More Canada open-data Actors by TrueNorthData

• Canada Tenders Scraper — federal + Québec government tenders (CanadaBuys, SEAO)
• Contractor License Scraper Canada — Quebec RBQ + Ontario HCRA builder & trade licences
• Canada Charities Scraper — CRA registered charities directory
• Canada New Incorporations — fresh federal company registrations, daily

All built on official Canadian open data.