Observed Signal · Jul 6, 2026 · Technical Guide · Source: DEV Community · Impact: 2/5 · Sentiment: Positive
How to Access Canadian Charity Data via API
This technical guide explains how to programmatically obtain Canada's national list of registered charities (≈85,000 records) published by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) as open data. The dataset is distributed as ~20 CSVs (three key files for identification, websites and directors) on the Open Government Portal and is refreshed annually from T3010 returns. The article shows three access options: querying individual resources via the CKAN datastore API, downloading and joining the CSVs by Business Number (BN), or using an Apify Actor (Canada Charities Scraper) that returns a joined, decoded single-record-per-charity JSON API. The Actor is exposed via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and is priced at $6 per 1,000 records for the hosted service.
Provides practical, reproducible methods to access a large, national open dataset useful for prospecting, data enrichment and market research; relevant to data teams and vendors but not industry-shifting.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) publishes a national 'List of charities' open dataset of about 85,000 registered charities.
- The CRA dataset is distributed as roughly 20 CSVs; three important files for contact directories are Identification (~84k rows), Charity Contact Web Addresses (~34k rows), and Directors/Officers (~570k rows).
- Each CSV resource on the Open Government Portal is queryable via CKAN's datastore_search API for spot lookups; full dataset builds require downloading and joining files by Business Number (BN).
- The data is refreshed annually from charities' T3010 returns and should be treated as a yearly snapshot rather than a live feed.
- An Apify Actor (Canada Charities Scraper by truenorthdata) joins and decodes the files into one record per charity, supports MCP access, and is priced at $6 per 1,000 records for hosted calls.
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