Canada Tenders — Federal + Quebec (Open Data)

The procurement data MERX charges $30–160/month for — normalized from official Canadian open-data portals, free to access. No login required, no scraping, no ToS risk.

Covers federal CanadaBuys tenders (all departments, all provinces) and Quebec SEAO in one consistent schema.

Quickstart (30 seconds)

1. Click Try for free above — no credit card required for your first run.
2. Leave the default input (federal + QC, open tenders, up to 500 records) and click Start.
3. Download results as JSON, CSV, or connect via the Apify API.

Typical first run: ~850 federal + up to 500 Quebec tenders in under 30 seconds.

For a daily-diff workflow, set postedAfter to yesterday and schedule daily — you get only new tenders added in the past 24 hours.

What this Actor does

Fetches and normalizes tender/procurement notices from multiple Canadian jurisdictions into a single, consistent schema. Every field is sourced from official government open-data portals licensed under open government licences.

Covered jurisdictions

Jurisdiction	Source	Feed type	Typical volume	Update frequency
Federal	CanadaBuys	Open CSV (PSPC daily export)	~850 open tenders	Daily
Quebec (QC)	SEAO via Données Québec	OCDS JSON (weekly)	~5,000 releases/week	Weekly

Dropped sources and reasons

Portal	Reason dropped
BC Bid	Login-walled; redirects to session-required pages
Alberta Purchasing Connection	Cloudflare-protected; no public API or open-data feed
SaskTenders	No accessible public JSON/API endpoint (ASP.NET session redirect)
Ontario Tenders (etenders.ca)	Session-required login system
Manitoba Tenders	No structured open-data feed; HTML only
NS / NB / PEI / NL	No dedicated open-data procurement portal found

Federal (CanadaBuys) covers all federal departments across every province, which represents a significant majority of Canadian public procurement value. Quebec's SEAO is the largest provincial portal with a clean OCDS open-data feed.

Use cases

• Contractors finding bids — monitor for new tenders in your category and region; schedule the Actor daily with postedAfter set to yesterday
• Bid-intelligence platforms — build searchable procurement databases covering federal + provincial
• AI procurement agents — feed tender notices to AI agents that match opportunities to vendor capabilities; the normalized schema makes this plug-and-play
• Vendor pipeline management — filter by keywords for your industry, track closingDate urgency
• Market research — analyze government spending categories, procurement methods, and buying departments

Input schema

Field	Type	Default	Description
jurisdictions	string[]	["federal","qc"]	Which jurisdictions to fetch. Valid: federal, qc
status	string	"open"	"open" = active tenders only; "all" = open + recently closed/awarded
postedAfter	string (YYYY-MM-DD)	null	Only include tenders published on or after this date
keywords	string	null	Comma-separated keyword filter on title + description (case-insensitive)
maxRecords	integer	500	Maximum total records across all jurisdictions

Output schema

Each record in the dataset:

{
  "jurisdiction": "Federal",
  "tenderId": "AR26SLHX_86026",
  "referenceNumber": "MX-443841357513",
  "solicitationNumber": "AR26SLHX_86026",
  "title": "Open Construction Source List for CFB Halifax",
  "org": "Defence Construction Canada - Atlantic Region",
  "category": "*CNST",
  "region": "Nova Scotia",
  "noticeType": null,
  "procurementMethod": "Competitive - Open bidding",
  "postedDate": "2026-01-23",
  "closingDate": "2029-03-31",
  "value": null,
  "status": "Open",
  "url": "https://www.merx.com/public/solicitations/3776296409/abstract?language=EN",
  "description": "Defence Construction Canada (DCC) is inviting contractors...",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-07-19T20:00:00.000Z",
  "raw": { "...": "trimmed source fields" }
}

Field notes

• value — estimated contract value if published at notice stage. CanadaBuys does not publish this at notice stage (null); SEAO includes it when available.
• description — truncated to 500 characters from source.
• raw — shallow key-value copy of source fields, long strings truncated to 400 chars, geometry/personal fields removed.
• status — Federal: "Open" / "Closed" / "Awarded". QC (SEAO/OCDS): "active" / "complete" / "cancelled".

Scheduling for daily-diff workflow

Set postedAfter to yesterday's date and schedule the Actor daily. This gives you only new tenders added in the last 24 hours:

{
  "jurisdictions": ["federal", "qc"],
  "status": "open",
  "postedAfter": "2026-07-19",
  "maxRecords": 500
}

Pricing

Pay-per-result on the Apify platform:

What	Cost
Per run (start fee)	$0.01
Per record returned	$0.002

Worked examples:

• 500 tenders (1 run): $0.01 + (500 × $0.002) = $1.01
• 1,000 tenders (1 run): $0.01 + (1,000 × $0.002) = $2.01
• Daily schedule, 100 new tenders/day: $0.01 + (100 × $0.002) = $0.21/day ($6.30/month)

Compare: MERX subscriptions start at $30–160/month for access to much of the same federal data.

Legal / ToS

All data sourced from:

• Open Government Licence – Canada
• Licence ouverte – Québec

Both are permissive open licences allowing commercial use with attribution. No robots.txt violations; no login bypass; no personal data.

Data freshness

• CanadaBuys refreshes its open-CSV exports daily. The openTenderNotice CSV always reflects the current set of open tenders.
• SEAO publishes weekly OCDS JSON files. The Actor automatically fetches the most recent weekly file from the Données Québec CKAN API.

FAQ

How fresh is the data? Federal (CanadaBuys) is updated daily. Quebec (SEAO) is updated weekly. The Actor fetches the latest available file on every run.

Is it legal to use this commercially? Yes. Both sources are published under permissive open-government licences that explicitly permit copying and commercial use with attribution.

Why aren't BC, Ontario, Alberta, etc. covered? Those provincial portals are login-walled or have no accessible open-data feed (see the "Dropped sources" table above). We'll add provinces as they become accessible.

Who do I contact for support? Email manager@agentumgroup.com — typically replied to within 1 business day.