Canada has about 85,000 registered charities, and the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) publishes the whole list as open data — legal names, mailing addresses, designations, categories, websites, and the directors/officers of each one. It's a huge, clean, national dataset that's perfect for prospecting, sector research, or due diligence on a specific charity.
The only friction: it ships as a set of separate CSVs you have to join yourself, keyed by Business Number (BN). This post shows how to pull it programmatically in 2026 — the files, the join, a query API, and a hosted option you can call from code or an AI agent.
What's in the data
The CRA "List of charities" open data lives on Canada's Open Government Portal under the Open Government Licence. It's compiled from each charity's annual T3010 return and refreshed yearly. It comes as ~20 CSVs; the ones that matter for a contact directory are three:
Identification — BN, legal name, operating name, full mailing address, city, province, postal code, designation, category (~84k rows).
