Quebec publishes its entire registry of active construction contractors as open data. Every licensed contractor in the province — roofers, electricians, general builders, excavators — sits in one file, updated daily, free to use under a Creative Commons license.
That sounds great until you download it. It's a ~10.8 MB zip. Inside is a CSV with 924,000 rows and French column headers. One contractor appears across many rows (one row per license category), so the raw file is not a list of contractors — it's a list of contractor-category pairs you have to group yourself. If you just want a clean, queryable list of "roofing contractors in Quebec with a phone number and email," the open data is technically available but practically painful.
This post shows how to skip the pain and pull that data through an API — either from your own code or directly from an AI agent over MCP. We'll use a small hosted scraper on Apify that turns the raw RBQ dump into structured, deduplicated records.
The source: RBQ's active license list
The data comes from the Régie du bâtiment du Québec (RBQ) — the provincial body that licenses construction contractors. Their "Liste des licences actives" dataset lives on the Données Québec open-data portal, is refreshed daily, and is published under CC-BY 4.0 (free to use with attribution). This is official government open data, not a scrape of a private portal.
