Canada Building Permits

Use the development applications: rezonings and site plans are filed at the planning stage, before building permits. Filter by ward, type and status, and schedule the run with new-or-changed mode.

This Actor costs $3.00 per 1,000 records on the free plan and $2.10 on paid plans; truenorthdata/canada-building-permits costs $5.00 and openpermits/building-permits-canada-us $3.50. It covers 7 Canadian cities (10 datasets), including Toronto development applications before a permit is issued, with a ward filter. openpermits also covers 4 US cities, which this Actor does not.

Two ways. For a fixed workflow, add Apify's n8n or Make node, choose **Run Actor**, enter aurelix/canada-building-permits-scraper and map the dataset to the next step. For an AI agent (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or an n8n AI Agent node), add https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=aurelix/canada-building-permits-scraper as an MCP server and ask for permits and development applications in plain words; setup for each client is in the section above. Runs bill your own Apify account at the same per-result price.

$3.00 per 1,000 applications ($2.10 on paid Apify plans), billed through your Apify account; you pay only for results. Apify's free plan includes $5 of credit a month, enough for about 1,666 applications. A price change is scheduled; the Store page shows it before it applies.

Toronto: Development Applications (OZ rezoning/official plan, SA site plan, SB subdivision, CD condominium, PL part lot) and Building Permits - Active Permits. Calgary: Development Permits and Building Permits. Edmonton: Development Permits and General Building Permits. Winnipeg: Detailed Development Permit Data. Vancouver: Issued building permits (no open development-applications dataset). Kitchener: Building Permits (ArcGIS). Montréal: Permis de construction, transformation et démolition (CKAN). Every record links to its open-data source.

It reads only public data any logged-out visitor can see: the official open-data portals of Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Kitchener (each city's open government licence) and Montréal (CC BY 4.0). It goes at a polite pace, never logs in and never solves CAPTCHAs. It returns application and permit fields (address, type, status, dates, description, link); owner, applicant and contact names are dropped, and a builder or contractor is kept only as a company. To have a record removed, open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab; if a city formally asks us to stop, this Actor will stop. You are responsible for using the data lawfully, incl. anti-spam and privacy laws; this is not legal advice.

The Actor remembers each application with its status for the same cities and filters (or the state name you set). It returns applications it has not returned before and those whose status changed. Entries are forgotten 400 days after they were last seen.

The submitted date for Toronto (both datasets) and Calgary development permits, the decision date for Edmonton development permits (its only date) and the issue date for every other dataset.

Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Vancouver refresh daily, but Toronto development applications appear about a month after submission; Kitchener and Montréal refresh about weekly. In our checks the newest records were 0 to 2 days old for Edmonton and for Toronto and Calgary building permits, about 5 days for Winnipeg, about 6 for Kitchener and about 9 for Montréal. Look back at least 8 days if you rely on Kitchener or Montréal.

Toronto's open data is genuinely thin, not cut short by this Actor: its Development Applications dataset holds about 25 to 40 planning applications a month (28 distinct in a recent 60 days, against 912 Calgary development permits) and adds them about a month after submission. Every page of the dataset is read. Add the Toronto building-permits dataset for volume (5,840 records in the same 60 days).

Not from the input: the Actor reads only these 10 datasets. Open an issue to ask for a city that publishes an open-licence dataset.

Yes. The input fields are described for agents: give cities, days back and optional filters. It works through Apify's MCP server and API.

One application-result per record saved. A dataset with no matching records adds nothing, so a run that finds nothing pays only the start fee. Each API call is tried 4 times; if a city still fails (HTTP 429, a server error or no connection), that dataset is skipped, the others are returned, and the status message names it. If every dataset fails, the run fails and no records are charged.

Types and statuses are case-insensitive text matches on the type or category and on the status, so 'issued' matches Issued and Issued Permit. Keywords match the description and the addresses. Wards match the ward number or name, e.g. 18 or Willowdale. A dataset without wards (Vancouver, Kitchener, Montréal and the Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton building permits) returns nothing when you set a ward filter.

Filters run first, then the newest records per dataset up to Max results per city, then new-or-changed mode drops records already returned. With a small cap, a feed sees only the newest records each run, so use 0 (no limit) or a generous cap for a scheduled feed. Records not saved because the maximum charge was reached are not remembered, so they come back next run.

Seconds for a normal run: in our Apify test runs Toronto and Calgary at 20 per city took 9 s, 7 datasets over 10 days 26 s, and Montréal over 12 days 4 s. The slowest case is all 10 datasets over 365 days, about 6 minutes, because every row in the window is read before the filters apply.

Up to 365 days back. Each dataset is read newest first up to 50,000 source rows per run, Vancouver up to about 10,000. In our tests 365 days of Montréal returned 20,034 records and 365 days of Vancouver 4,156, both under those caps. Max results per city goes up to 100,000.

app_id is the dataset plus the city's application or permit number, e.g. calgary-building:BP2026-14894, and each app_id is returned once per run. Toronto development applications have one source row per address; they are merged into one record with all addresses in addresses. Toronto building permits give one record per permit revision, and Kitchener keeps the newest row per permit.

Each city publishes different fields, and the Actor never fills one in. Postal codes come only from Toronto; project values only from Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton building permits, Vancouver and Kitchener; contractor companies only from Toronto and Calgary building permits and Kitchener, and only when the name reads as a company. Toronto building permits have no coordinates, and in our 30-day test Winnipeg records had no description.

Yes. Paste a Slack webhook URL to post a short digest (how many records, and the top 10 with links), or any webhook URL to receive the same digest as JSON (actor, newOnly, count, items, runUrl, text) for Zapier, Make or n8n. Nothing is sent when the run saved nothing. With new-or-changed mode on, the digest covers only the new and changed records.