Province
Full coverageShort answer
Ontario public records searchable online include the Ontario Business Registry, PPSA registrations, writs of execution, and professional licensing registers. Ontario has no consolidated public civil court docket search and its land registry cannot be searched by owner name — two gaps that shape every Ontario records project.
Governing privacy statute: PIPEDA (federal). Population 15,600,000. 4 documented gaps in what this province publishes.
Records landscape
Four registry families answer four different questions. A province can be excellent at one and unusable for another, and knowing which before you start is most of the skill.
Corporate registry
Court records
Land registry
Personal property security
Unusually good here
Gaps and limitations
These are structural limits of the province's systems, not paywalls and not gaps in our coverage. Where one applies, the report says which courthouse or registry office a manual retrieval would need.
Legal basis
Searching statutory public registries and court records requires no notice to the subject — they are two of the five categories the Regulations Specifying Publicly Available Information treat as collectable without consent. See acceptable use for the purposes we decline.
5 cities
A city page exists only where there is something city-specific to say — which courthouse hears its matters, which land registry division covers it, and the local quirks that cause failed searches.
Questions
Not comprehensively. Ontario does not operate a province-wide public civil docket searchable by party name. You can search CanLII for reported decisions at no cost, but most civil matters settle without a written judgment and so never appear there. A complete Ontario court search means identifying the likely courthouse and having the file searched at the registry counter.
There is no direct way. Ontario's land registry indexes by property rather than by owner, so no owner-name search exists. Holdings have to be inferred — corporate registered offices are often residential addresses, mortgage and PPSA registrations point at properties, litigation and lien filings name addresses, and municipal assessment rolls are inspectable. This is manual research rather than a lookup.
Roughly eight dollars per search. For a business debtor you need the exact legal entity name. For an individual you need the exact legal name and the date of birth — Ontario indexes individual debtors on both, so a search without a date of birth may not disclose registrations that exist and cannot be relied on as a clear.
Yes. Statutory public registries and court records are two of the five categories PIPEDA's Regulations Specifying Publicly Available Information permit collecting without consent. What is not permitted is using the resulting report to make employment, tenancy, credit, or insurance decisions unless you are dealing with a registered consumer reporting agency, or scraping social media, which the Privacy Commissioner addressed in the Clearview AI findings.
A Ontario search runs against the registries above and states its own coverage: what was searched, what returned nothing, and what would need a manual retrieval. How it works.
Markdown /locations/ontario.md — the same content with no navigation chrome, for machine readers.