Health Canada Drugs MCP server

Health Canada Drugs — the Canadian Drug Product Database

Every drug authorised for sale in Canada: DIN, brand name, active ingredients with strengths, dosage form, route, market status and the company behind it.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1576+ live data sources.

Scope — Canada, and only Canada

This is Canadian marketing authorisation. US approvals and labels are openfda and dailymed; the two are separate regulatory acts and a drug can be authorised in one and not the other. Tools are prefixed healthcanada so they never win a generic drug question.

Tools

Auth

Keyless. No registration.

Data source

• — Health Canada Drug Product Database.

Things the next person would otherwise rediscover

• An unrecognised filter is silently ignored and returns the ENTIRE 15 MB database, with HTTP 200 and the drug you asked about somewhere inside it. The query parameter is brandname; the JSON field is brandname. Measured: ?brandname=ACTIFED → 3,576 bytes; ?brandname=ACTIFED → 15,040,036 bytes; ?search=ACTIFED → 15,040,036 bytes. Matching the response field name is the natural guess and it is the wrong one. This pack whitelists the working parameters and throws rather than send an unknown one.
• id= means different things on different endpoints. On /drugproduct/, /activeingredient/, /status/, /form/ and /route/ it is the drug code. On /company/ it is the company code. Drug 11685 is ACTIFED PLUS CAPLET (Glaxo Wellcome); company 11685 is DERMAL DEFENSE, INC. of Michigan. Passing a drug code to /company/ returns a real record for an unrelated firm with nothing to signal the switch — so the company is read from the drug's own record and /company/ is never called with a drug code here.
• The upstream returns a bare object for a single hit and an array otherwise. Code that assumes an array drops every single-result lookup.
• DIN leading zeros are significant — 01933655 is not 1933655.
• No working company-name filter. Both companyname and company_name return the full 1.4 MB company list, so company search is deliberately not offered rather than shipped as a 1.4 MB-per-call tool.
• A "Cancelled Post Market" status is not a safety withdrawal — Health Canada retains records for products no longer marketed, for any reason.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "health-canada-drugs": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/health-canada-drugs/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/health-canada-drugs/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — askpipeworx, discovertools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.