Open Knowledge

Company Register / 2013 45% open

Canada


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? Yes
  •   Is the data machine readable? No (HTML)
  •   Available in bulk? No
  •   Is the data provided on a timely and up to date basis? Yes
  •   Publicly available? Yes
  •   Is data in digital form? Yes
  •   Is the data available online? Yes (Here)
  •   Does the data exist? Yes

Details

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

Contributors

Reviewers

  • anonymous

Submitters

  • anonymous