Guide
Short answer
To audit your own Canadian public footprint, search corporate registries for directorships, court records and CanLII for litigation, PPSA and writ registries for liens, professional registers for your licensing status, and the open web plus archives for old content. Most of it is free, and some of it can be corrected or de-indexed.
6 of 6 steps below you can run yourself for nothing. 3 things in this area cannot be done lawfully by anyone.
The situation
You're about to be searched — by an employer, a landlord, a date, a counterparty — and you want to know what they'll see before they see it.
6 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
Old directorships persist. A company you helped a friend incorporate in 2014 and forgot about may still list you as a director at your old address, and may be in default on its annual returns. Search Corporations Canada, your province's registry, and Québec's free REQ.
Step 02
Free and nationwide. Reported decisions are permanently published and highly indexed, so a matter from years ago can be the first result for your name. Knowing it is there is the prerequisite to doing anything about it.
Step 03
Discharged security interests sometimes remain registered, and errors happen. Finding a stale registration is the only way to get it discharged, and finding a writ you did not know about is significantly better than discovering it during a mortgage application.
Step 04
The Wayback Machine holds pages you removed years ago — old blogs, forum profiles, staff bios, club rosters. Deleting the live page did not delete the archive. Knowing what is there lets you request removal where the archive's policies permit.
Step 05
Confirm your status, address, and any noted conditions are accurate. Regulator entries are highly ranked in search results and errors are surprisingly common.
Step 06
Resign stale directorships and file the change. Request discharge of satisfied PPSA registrations. Correct your professional register entry. If you are in Québec, Law 25 gives you de-indexing and cessation-of-dissemination rights that have no equivalent elsewhere in Canada. And under PIPEDA you can ask any organisation holding your personal information for access and correction — including us.
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.
Delete a court decision from CanLII
The open court principle means published judgments stay published. Limited exceptions exist for sealing or anonymisation, granted by the court on application.
Remove yourself from a corporate registry historically
You can resign and file the change going forward, but historical filings remain part of the permanent record.
Have search engines forget you
Canada has no general right to be forgotten. Québec's Law 25 provides a de-indexing right for Québec residents in defined circumstances; the rest of Canada does not.
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
Typically: any corporate directorships and their registered addresses, reported court decisions naming you, registered liens and writs, your professional licensing status and any discipline, a telephone directory listing if you have a landline, obituaries naming you as a relative, and whatever the open web and its archives hold. Not your credit report, not your criminal record, and not your income — none of those is public.
Partially. You can resign stale directorships, get satisfied PPSA registrations discharged, and correct errors in professional registers. You cannot remove published court decisions or historical registry filings. Québec residents have de-indexing and cessation-of-dissemination rights under Law 25 that are not available elsewhere in Canada.
Yes. PIPEDA Principle 4.9 gives you a right of access to your own personal information held by an organisation, and Principle 4.10 gives you a right to challenge its accuracy. Organisations generally have thirty days to respond. That applies to us too — our subject request channel is on the privacy page.
It is worth twenty minutes of free searching. The common unpleasant surprises are a forgotten directorship in a company now in default, an old reported decision ranking first for your name, and a satisfied lien that was never discharged. All three are fixable, but only if you know about them first.
Markdown /how-to/self-background-audit.md — the same content with no navigation chrome, for machine readers.