DEV Community: Vadim Zabin

Building Permit Leads in Canada: Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton (2026)

Vadim Zabin — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 04:31:59 +0000

Every week, thousands of homeowners and businesses in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton get building permits approved. Each permit is a public record — an address where someone is about to spend money on construction. Here is how to turn municipal open data into a contractor lead list, with working code and a no-code option.

Why building permits are the best contractor leads

A building permit is the strongest buying signal in the trades industry:

A roofing permit means a homeowner is replacing a roof — and probably comparing quotes right now.
A new single-family dwelling means a general contractor will need HVAC, electrical, plumbing, landscaping and materials for the next 12 months.
A demolition permit often precedes a rebuild — early signal for every trade.
High project values identify commercial jobs worth a supplier's attention.

Unlike purchased lead lists, permits are fresh, verified by the city, and include the address, the work description and often the contractor and estimated project cost.

Where the data lives (and what's actually open)

Canada's four largest construction markets all publish permit data through official open-data programs:

City	Platform	Update cadence	Contractor name	Project value
Toronto	CKAN datastore	Daily	–	Yes
Vancouver	Opendatasoft API	Frequent	Yes	Yes
Calgary	Socrata (SODA)	Weekly-ish (can lag)	Yes	Yes
Edmonton	Socrata (SODA)	Frequent	–	–

All four are published for reuse under open-data licences — no scraping grey zones.

Quick example: pulling Calgary permits with Python

Calgary's dataset is the richest — it includes contractor names, estimated project cost and square footage:

import requests

url = "https://data.calgary.ca/resource/c2es-76ed.json"
params = {
    "$limit": 100,
    "$order": "issueddate DESC",
    "$where": "issueddate >= '2026-05-01T00:00:00.000'",
}
rows = requests.get(url, params=params).json()
for r in rows[:5]:
    print(r["issueddate"][:10], "|", r.get("description"), "|",
          r.get("contractorname"), "|", r.get("estprojectcost"))

Vancouver uses the Opendatasoft Explore API, Toronto a CKAN datastore, Edmonton another Socrata dataset — each with different field names, pagination rules and quirks (Toronto's columns are UPPER_SNAKE, Calgary's dataset can lag a few weeks, Vancouver caps deep pagination).

The hard part: one schema, four cities

If you want leads across cities, you need to normalize four different schemas into one: permit id, type of work, description, address, contractor, project value, dates. Then deduplicate, filter by keyword ("roof", "solar", "pool"), by minimum project value, and set up a scheduler so your sales team gets only new permits every Monday — not the same list twice.

That's a real engineering project. Here is the shortcut.

The no-code option: one API for all four cities

I maintain an Apify Actor that does the normalization, filtering and monitoring:

Building Permits Canada — Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton

Example — roofing leads in Calgary, projects worth $20k+:

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

Output — one clean record per permit:

{
    "permitId": "BP2026-11223",
    "city": "Calgary",
    "workClass": "Alteration",
    "description": "REROOF, SOLAR PV INSTALLATION",
    "address": "248 SADDLELAKE DR NE",
    "contractor": "ACME ROOFING LTD",
    "projectValue": 46089.8,
    "issuedDate": "2026-06-28"
}

The onlyNewSinceLastRun flag turns it into a monitoring feed: schedule it weekly on Apify, connect email or Slack, and every Monday you get only the permits that didn't exist last week. Pricing is per record ($5 per 1,000) — a weekly lead list for a single trade in one city typically costs cents.

Export to Excel/CSV works out of the box, so the list can go straight to a sales team or a CRM import.

Use cases beyond lead gen

Building-material suppliers: target active job sites by neighbourhood and project value.
Equipment rental: new construction permits = upcoming demand for machinery.
PropTech and researchers: construction activity by community, month and value.
Real estate investors: renovation clusters signal appreciating streets.

FAQ

Is this legal? Yes — all four cities publish permit data through official open-data programs licensed for reuse.

Does it include homeowner contact info? No. Records contain the address, work description, and (in Calgary/Vancouver) the applicant or contractor business name — not personal phone numbers or emails. Door-knocking and direct mail are the standard plays.

Which cities are next? Ottawa and Montréal are on the roadmap — open an issue on the Actor page to vote.

How do I try it free? Apify's free tier includes $5 in credits — roughly a thousand permit records.

Building something with Canadian public data — permits, tenders, registries? I write about turning open data into products. Questions welcome in the comments.

How to Get Canadian Government Tenders by API (2026 Guide)

Vadim Zabin — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 04:21:05 +0000

Canada's governments buy over $200 billion in goods and services every year. Every tender is public — but the data is scattered across a dozen portals. Here is how to get it programmatically in 2026: every official source, their APIs and formats, and a working setup for automated monitoring.

The problem: one country, a dozen portals

If you sell to the Canadian public sector — or build tools for companies that do — you quickly discover there is no single API for Canadian tenders:

Federal tenders live on CanadaBuys, the Government of Canada's system of record.
Québec runs its own system, SEAO, covering ministries, municipalities, schools and hospitals.
Nova Scotia publishes procurement data through its open-data portal.
Ontario, BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan run separate portals (Jaggaer, Ivalua and custom systems) with no public data feeds.
Commercial aggregators like MERX charge subscription fees for a unified view.

The good news: the three biggest open sources publish machine-readable data under open licences. Let's walk through them.

Source 1: CanadaBuys (federal) — open CSV, updated every 2 hours

CanadaBuys publishes official open data files under the Open Government Licence:

New tender notices — refreshed every 2 hours during business hours
Open tender notices — all tenders currently accepting bids, refreshed daily
Award notices and contract history — who won what

The files are bilingual CSVs with a documented data dictionary. A quick look with Python:

import pandas as pd

url = "https://canadabuys.canada.ca/opendata/pub/openTenderNotice-ouvertAvisAppelOffres.csv"
df = pd.read_csv(url)
print(df.shape)          # thousands of open tenders
print(df.columns[:8])    # bilingual column names like "title-titre-eng"

Watch out for three things: bilingual column names (title-titre-eng, tenderClosingDate-appelOffresdateCloture), occasional schema drift, and multi-category rows (procurementCategory can be CNST,SRV).

Source 2: SEAO (Québec) — OCDS JSON on Données Québec

Québec publishes SEAO data as weekly JSON files in the Open Contracting Data Standard (CC-BY). Each weekly file contains tender notices and awarded contracts as OCDS "releases" — with buyer, UNSPSC classification, award values in CAD.

The catch: file URLs change weekly, so you must query the CKAN catalogue API first to find the latest resources, then download and parse each file. Titles are French-only.

Source 3: Nova Scotia — awarded tenders on Socrata

Nova Scotia publishes awarded public tenders — government plus municipalities, universities, school boards and health authorities — with the winning vendor and award amount:

https://data.novascotia.ca/resource/m6ps-8j6u.json?$limit=100&$order=awarded_date DESC

This is market intelligence rather than live opportunities: who wins contracts in your category, and at what price.

What about Ontario, BC, Alberta?

As of mid-2026, none of them publish open data feeds for current tenders. Their portals are JavaScript applications that require browser-level scraping. If you only need federal + Québec + Nova Scotia, you can skip that complexity entirely.

The DIY reality check

Building this yourself means: three different formats (CSV, OCDS JSON, Socrata), bilingual normalization, weekly-changing URLs, schema drift, deduplication across sources, and a scheduler with failure alerts. It's a fun weekend project — and then an unpaid maintenance job forever, because government portals change things without notice.

The 5-minute alternative: a ready-made API

I maintain an Apify Actor that does all of the above and returns one normalized feed:

Canada Tenders Scraper — Federal, Quebec, Nova Scotia

One schema across all three sources: title (EN/FR), buyer, category, UNSPSC, closing date, contact, notice URL, award value where applicable. Example input:

{
    "sources": ["canadabuys", "seao"],
    "keywords": ["software", "cloud", "informatique"],
    "closingWithinDays": 30,
    "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
    "maxResults": 500
}

The onlyNewSinceLastRun flag is the key feature for monitoring: schedule the Actor daily, and each run returns only tenders you haven't seen before. Connect it to email or Slack through Apify integrations and you have a tender-alert system for a few dollars a month — no subscription, you pay per record ($4 per 1,000).

Calling it from your own code:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("truenorthdata/canada-tenders-scraper").call(run_input={
    "keywords": ["construction", "roofing"],
    "closingWithinDays": 21,
    "maxResults": 200,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["titleEn"] or item["titleFr"], "|", item["closingDate"], "|", item["buyerOrg"])

Everything runs on official open data — no proxies, no scraping grey zones, no logins.

FAQ

Is scraping Canadian government tenders legal? The sources above are official open-data programs published for reuse (Open Government Licence – Canada, CC-BY Québec). Yes.

How fresh is the data? Federal: every 2 hours for new tenders. Québec: weekly files. Nova Scotia: monthly award updates.

Can I get tenders for a specific province only? Yes — filter by region (e.g. "Ontario") on federal data, or select the Québec/Nova Scotia sources directly.

What's the cheapest way to try it? Apify's free tier includes $5 of credit — enough for ~1,000 tender records to see if the data fits your use case.

Questions or a source you'd like covered (Ontario? BC? municipal portals?) — open an issue on the Actor page and I'll take a look.