Introducing GrantData: An API for Canadian Government Grants and Research Funding

The Canadian federal government discloses every grant and contribution over $25,000. The three major research councils publish every award they have ever made. Infrastructure Canada lists every funded project in every province. All of this data is public.

Getting at it is another matter. The grants are buried in proactive disclosure CSVs on open.canada.ca. NSERC and SSHRC publish separate annual files going back decades, each with its own column layout. Infrastructure Canada uses a different encoding entirely. None of these sources share a schema, and none of them offer an API.

GrantData fixes that. One API, one schema, 1.9 million records.

What GrantData covers

GrantData normalizes three categories of Canadian public funding into a single queryable format:

• Federal Grants and Contributions (1.2M+ records, 2018 to present): every grant and contribution disclosed by federal departments under the proactive disclosure policy. Department, recipient, agreement value, amendment value, description, and program name.
• Research Grants (640K+ records, 1991 to present): awards from NSERC (natural sciences and engineering) and SSHRC (social sciences and humanities). Researcher name, institution, program, award amount, fiscal year, and research area.
• Infrastructure Projects (20K+ records, all provinces): federally funded infrastructure projects tracked by Infrastructure Canada. Project title, location, total estimated cost, federal contribution, expected completion, and program stream.

Key features

• Full-text search: search across recipient names, project descriptions, department names, and research areas
• Rich filtering: filter by department, recipient, entity type, value range, and date range
• Recipient profiles: look up any organization or researcher by name to see their complete funding history across all sources
• Stats endpoint: aggregate funding by department, recipient, or time period. Track how federal spending shifts year over year
• Bilingual data: French and English fields preserved from the original sources (program_en, program_fr, description_en, description_fr, agreement_title_en, agreement_title_fr)
• Monthly updates: automated pipelines pull fresh data from all four sources on a regular schedule

Who it's for

GrantData is built for developers and organizations working in:

• Grant consulting: track which departments fund which types of projects, identify programs with growing budgets, and benchmark client applications against historical awards
• Economic development: monitor infrastructure investment by region and program. See which communities are receiving federal funding and for what
• Academic research: analyse NSERC and SSHRC funding patterns over 30+ years. Study how research priorities shift across disciplines, institutions, and funding cycles
• Journalism and accountability: follow the money from federal departments to recipients. Cross-reference grant disclosures with public commitments and policy announcements

Get started

GrantData is live with 1.9 million records ready to query. Start with the free tier on RapidAPI, no credit card required.