Company Register 15% open

What data is expected?

List of registered (limited liability) companies. The submissions in this data category does not need to include detailed financial data such as balance sheet etc. To satisfy this category, the following minimum criteria must be met:

• Name of company
• Unique identifier of the company
• Company address
• Updated at least once a month

What data is available

•   Openly licensed? No (No URL given)
•   Is the data available for free? No
•   Is the data machine readable? No (n/a)
•   Available in bulk? No
•   Is the data provided on a timely and up to date basis? Yes
•   Publicly available? No(as Federal Corporation Information published by Industry Canada)
•   Is data in digital form? No
•   Is the data available online? No (No URL given)
•   Does the data exist? Yes

Details

It is possible to retrieve some company information by inputting a keyword of at least 3 characters into a search here: https://www.ic.gc.ca/app/scr/cc/CorporationsCanada/fdrlCrpSrch.html?locale=en_CA up to a maximum search size of 200 results. However, this places restrictions on what data can be obtained, even though the data does exist. More details below:

Because Canada is a federation of provinces and territories, these data would be considered incomplete, as companies are also registered, sometimes exclusively at those jurisdictions. A complete picture would require going to each jurisdiction and assessing their degree of openness. This response is solely for the federal / national level. These data are however generally incomplete, are destroyed every 7 years as per the tax act and are inconsistently managed. They are also not easily available to the public. While these national scale data meet many of the OKFN criteria, the fact that they are incomplete, inaccurate and destroyed every seven years is problematic, especially regarding transparency and investigations into money laundering. Furthermore, they are not readily accessible by the data producer, you can find a company but not a list of all the companies. Also, the Corporations Canada database "does NOT include corporations created under financial legislation (such as financial institutions, insurance companies or loan and trust companies) or those created under provincial/territorial legislation or corporate legislation from another jurisdiction." See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_registers#Canada

The terms and conditions restrict commercial use, therefore the data is not openly licensed: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/icgc.nsf/eng/h_07033.html#ownership

(No change from 2014)

Reviewer comments

It is not possible to browse through the database or access data without providing a search term, so I have penalised the registry as placing too many restrictions on data access.