open.canada.ca API

Base URL

https://open.canada.ca/data/en/api/3/action

Authentication

No API key for reads. The `/data/en/` and `/data/fr/` prefixes serve the same catalogue; the language only changes the CKAN interface strings, not the bilingual data fields.

Rate limit

No published limit. Records carry heavy bilingual metadata, so keep `rows` small.

Pricing

Free. Federal datasets are released under the Open Government Licence – Canada, which permits commercial reuse with attribution.

CORS

Enabled — callable directly from browser JavaScript

Official docs

Read the docs

Every request below was executed against the live API on 2026-08-21, and the response shown is the real body it returned — not an illustration.

curl 'https://open.canada.ca/data/en/api/3/action/package_search?rows=1'

const res = await fetch("https://open.canada.ca/data/en/api/3/action/package_search?rows=1");
if (!res.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${res.status}`);
const data = await res.json();
console.log(data);

import requests

res = requests.get("https://open.canada.ca/data/en/api/3/action/package_search?rows=1", timeout=20)
res.raise_for_status()
print(res.json())

{
  "help": "https://open.canada.ca/data/en/api/3/action/help_show?name=package_search",
  "success": true,
  "result": {
    "count": 47792,
    "facets": {},
    "facet_ranges": {
      "portal_release_date": {
        "counts": [
          "1926-08-21T00:00:00Z",
          26102
        ],
        "gap": "+100YEARS",
        "start": "1926-08-21T00:00:00Z",
        "end": "2126-08-21T00:00:00Z"
      }
    },
    "results": [
      {
        "association_type": [],
        "audience": [],
        "author": null,
        "author_email": null,
        "collection": "primary",
        "contributor": {
          "en": "",
          "fr": ""
        },
        "creator": "",
        "creator_user_id": "aa584ab4-544c-4c5c-81da-d1cff9bd96fa",
        "data_series_issue_identification": {
          "en": "",
          "fr": ""
        },
        "data_series_name": {
          "en": "",
          "fr": ""
        },
        "date_published": "2017-02-14 00:00:00",
        "digital_object_identifier": "",
        "display_flags": [],
        "frequency": "P3M",
        "geographic_region": [],
        "id": "f132b8a6-abad-43d6-b6ad-2301e778b1b6",
        "imso_approval": "true",
        "isopen": false,
        "jurisdiction": "federal",
        "keywords": {
          "en": [
            "Proactive Disclosure",
            "PD",
            "position reclassification"
          ],
          "fr": [
            "Divulgation proactive",
            "reclassification des postes"
          ]
        },
        "license_id": "ca-ogl-lgo",
        "license_title": "Open Government Lic

successboolean

Whether the CKAN action succeeded. Check it — CKAN answers HTTP 200 with `success: false` when it rejects your parameters.

result.countinteger

Total datasets matching the query. 47,792 for an unfiltered search at the time of testing.

results[].title / notes / keywordsobject

Bilingual objects keyed `en` and `fr`, not strings. This is the single biggest difference from other CKAN portals.

results[].jurisdictionstring

`federal`, `provincial` or `municipal` — the portal harvests beyond the federal government.

results[].collectionstring

`primary` for ordinary datasets, and separate values for proactive disclosure and publication records.

results[].frequencystring

Update cadence as an ISO 8601 duration such as `P3M` (three months) or `P1Y`, not as an English word.

results[].imso_approvalstring

Whether the Information Management Senior Official signed off. A Canadian government workflow field with no equivalent elsewhere.

result.facet_rangesobject

Date histogram over `portal_release_date`, returned even when you requested no facets.

• Pull Canadian federal contract and travel expense disclosures on a schedule
• Build a bilingual dataset search that shows French titles to French users
• Harvest federal metadata into a catalogue that also indexes other CKAN portals
• Track which departments publish most, using the `organization` field
• Locate direct CSV and shapefile URLs from the `resources` array