Canadian Register of Large Vessels (Transport Canada)

Use in your agent

Load the Canadian Register of Large Vessels into pandas and Parquet. Checked against the provider's documentation on Nov 5, 2026.

Access

• No key for the open.canada.ca dataset page and the XLSX download.
• The data.tc.gc.ca v1.3 JSON API was unreliable when checked (HTTP 500 / empty or 404 responses); this skill uses the XLSX instead.

Request

curl -s 'https://opendatatc.tc.canada.ca/large-vessel-registry_dataset_en.xlsx' -o large-vessels.xlsx

Format

XLSX workbook: Official Number, Vessel Name, IMO Vessel Number, Hull Number, Year of Build, Port of Registry, Gross/Net Tonnage, Length/Breadth/Depth, Engine/Propulsion and related fields.

Load into pandas and Parquet

Needs Python 3 with requests, pandas and pyarrow.

"""Transport Canada Canadian Register of Large Vessels XLSX -> pandas -> Parquet."""
import io
import pandas as pd
import requests

UA = {"User-Agent": "SignalLabCheck/1.0"}
URL = "https://opendatatc.tc.canada.ca/large-vessel-registry_dataset_en.xlsx"
r = requests.get(URL, headers=UA, timeout=120)
r.raise_for_status()
df = pd.read_excel(io.BytesIO(r.content), dtype=str)  # needs openpyxl
df.to_parquet("transport_canada_large_vessels.parquet", index=False)
print(len(df), "vessels;", df["IMO Vessel Number"].notna().sum(), "with an IMO number")
print(df[["Official Number", "Vessel Name", "IMO Vessel Number", "Port of Registry"]].head())

Run by us on 2026-11-05 (python 3 | pandas | pyarrow | requests | openpyxl). Result: Fetched the English XLSX on 2026-11-05: 26,671 vessel rows, 1,165 with an IMO number. Re-checked 2026-11-06: Last-Modified Thu, 05 Nov 2026, newest Certificate Issuing/Registration date 2026-11-04. The data.tc.gc.ca v1.3 JSON API was unreliable the same nights, so this skill reads the XLSX.

Limits

• Not stated numeric rate limit.
• One XLSX of about 3.1 MB; parsing needs openpyxl.

Quirks

• The JSON API (data.tc.gc.ca v1.3) was unreliable when checked (HTTP 500 / empty or 404 responses); use the XLSX resource instead.
• The XLSX is regenerated regularly (registrations through 2026-11-04 in the file checked 2026-11-06); do not treat the catalog-record last_modified metadata as the data vintage.

Terms and attribution

• Open Government Licence – Canada: worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, including commercial use, with source acknowledgment.

Sources

• https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada: “worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive licence to use the Information, including for commercial purposes”
• https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/bf00b7f4-e370-46b7-94e4-0bdedc98531b: “The Canadian Register of Vessels contains information on Vessels registered in Canada.”