Guide
Short answer
To find someone in Canada, work through public records in order of yield: telephone directory listings, corporate registries, professional licensing registers, obituaries naming relatives, court and lien filings, and archived web pages. Canadian voter lists and driver records are not public, so those American shortcuts do not exist here.
6 of 7 steps below you can run yourself for nothing. 5 things in this area cannot be done lawfully by anyone.
The situation
You need to reach someone — an old friend, a relative, a debtor, a witness — and the last contact information you have is dead. You've tried searching their name and got nothing useful.
7 steps
In order of yield. Every step marked “do it yourself” is one you can run without us, with the cost stated where there is one.
Step 01
Canada411 remains one of the few lawfully searchable sources of residential addresses in Canada, and it is free. Search the surname plus city rather than the full name, because listings are often under a spouse's or initial's name. Landlines only, so a mobile-only household will not appear — absence here proves nothing.
Step 02
If the person has ever incorporated anything, the registered office is public — and for small companies it is very often their home address. Search Corporations Canada federally, then Québec's REQ, which is free, then BC Registries. This single step resolves more locates than any other, and people consistently skip it.
Step 03
Over forty regulated professions in Ontario alone publish free public registers, and most list a business address and current status. Lawyers, doctors, nurses, engineers, accountants, real estate agents, and insurance brokers are all verifiable this way. If you know their occupation, go straight here.
Step 04
This is the most underrated technique in Canadian people-finding. An obituary names the deceased's spouse, children, siblings, and grandchildren, frequently with cities of residence and maiden names. One obituary for a parent often produces the current city for every child. Search the surname plus a likely city on obituary aggregators and funeral home sites.
Step 05
The Wayback Machine recovers deleted staff directories, old company About pages, club rosters, and personal sites. If the person had any web presence a decade ago that has since been removed, it is very likely still archived. This is the best source for employment history someone has scrubbed.
Step 06
These capture an address as of a filing date, which is often more recent and more reliable than directory data. An Ontario PPSA individual search needs the exact legal name and a date of birth. British Columbia's Court Services Online will search civil and criminal filings by party name for about six dollars.
Step 07
By this point you likely have several candidates. The work is deciding which is your person: does a middle initial match, does a former address overlap with a known associate, is a date of birth consistent with a corporate filing. Conflicts matter as much as matches. Acting on an unscored match is how people end up contacting the wrong household.
Honest limits
Not a paywall and not a coverage gap. Each of these is either absent from every Canadian public record or unlawful to obtain — and anyone selling it to you is misrepresenting what they have, or committing an offence to get it.
Look them up in the voter list
Canadian voter lists are not public documents, unlike in several US states.
Look up their driver's licence or vehicle registration
Provincial motor vehicle records are restricted by statute and are not released to private searchers.
Find their mobile number
Mobile numbers are not in any public directory. There is no lawful mobile-number lookup in Canada.
Get their address from Canada Post
Canada Post does not disclose addresses or forwarding information to third parties.
Find them through their bank or employer records
Neither is public, and obtaining them by pretext is identity fraud under Criminal Code s.403.
Everything we decline at every tier, with the reason for each
Before you pay
If you do need it
This tier will not include
Questions
Canada411 for a directory listing, then Corporations Canada and Québec's REQ for any registered office address, then obituaries for their relatives, then the Wayback Machine for deleted web pages. All four are free and together they resolve a substantial fraction of locates without spending anything.
American people-search relies on voter rolls, driver records, and commercially available credit header data. None of the three is accessible in Canada: voter lists are not public, motor vehicle records are statutorily restricted, and credit header data may only be furnished by a registered consumer reporting agency for a permitted purpose. Canadian searches work from a genuinely narrower base.
Searching public records is lawful and requires no notice to the person. PIPEDA permits collection from telephone directories, professional and business directories, statutory public registries, court records, and material the person published themselves. Using what you find to harass or contact someone against their wishes is a separate matter and can be criminal harassment under Criminal Code s.264.
We will not release a located address where there is any protection order, peace bond, or no-contact condition in either direction — including one we discover during the search. If someone has deliberately gone to ground and there is no lawful entitlement behind the locate, the honest answer is that we will decline the work.
The free sources cost nothing and often suffice. Fee-bearing searches run roughly six to eleven dollars each — BC court files, Ontario PPSA and writ searches, corporate profile reports — and a thorough multi-province locate touches enough of them that a bundled report is usually cheaper than running them individually.
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