Guide
Short answer
In British Columbia, search Court Services Online by party name for about six dollars per file. In Québec, search plumitifs through SOQUIJ. In Ontario and Alberta there is no public online civil docket, so you search CanLII for reported decisions and then retrieve files at the relevant courthouse.
5 of 6 steps below you can run yourself for nothing. 5 things in this area cannot be done lawfully by anyone.
The situation
You want to know whether a person or company has a litigation history — before you hire them, sign with them, lend to them, or rely on them.
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
CanLII publishes reported decisions from every Canadian jurisdiction at no cost. If a matter produced a written judgment, it is likely here. Understand the limitation clearly: most civil matters settle without a written judgment, so an empty CanLII result means no reported decision, not no litigation.
Step 02
CSO offers genuine party-name search across BC Supreme and Provincial Court, civil and criminal, with full file detail for roughly six dollars. It is the best court records resource in Canada and there is no reason not to use it when BC is in play.
Step 03
Plumitifs through SOQUIJ provide party-name docket search across civil, criminal, and penal matters. Fees apply per search. Coverage is much closer to BC than to Ontario.
Step 04
With no consolidated docket, you have to guess where a matter would have been filed — usually where the defendant resides or where the events occurred — and then have the registry searched. Note that Mississauga matters are filed at Brampton, and similar regional quirks catch people out constantly.
Step 05
A writ of execution means someone already obtained a judgment and is enforcing it — often more informative than the underlying file. Liens and bankruptcy filings similarly reveal disputes that never produced a reported decision.
Step 06
Securities commissions, professional regulators, and tribunals publish proceedings in full and for free. These are often the most substantive findings on a person and are routinely missed because people search only courts.
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.
Search all Canadian courts in one query
There is no national docket. Each province runs its own system, and some have no public online search at all.
Find matters that settled before judgment
Settled matters usually leave no published record. In provinces without docket search, they may leave no findable trace at all.
See family court or divorce files
Family files are access-restricted in every province and are not publicly name-searchable.
See sealed files or young offender matters
Excluded by law — sealing orders and the Youth Criminal Justice Act respectively.
Get a criminal record check from court records
Court records show charges in a specific courthouse and their disposition. A criminal record check is a police product requiring the subject's consent. Different things.
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
Yes, under the open court principle, and court records are one of the five categories PIPEDA treats as publicly available. But 'public' means a member of the public may inspect them, not that they are searchable online by name. That gap between the principle and the plumbing is what makes Canadian court research uneven by province.
Ontario has never built a province-wide public civil docket search. Coverage is court-by-court and much of it is counter-only. British Columbia built Court Services Online and Québec has plumitifs; Ontario simply has not, which is why Ontario litigation searches cost more and take longer than BC ones.
It can show criminal court records in provinces where those are searchable — BC and Québec — meaning charges laid in that province's courts and how they resolved. That is not a criminal record check, which comes from the RCMP or a police service, requires consent, and is usually fingerprint-verified. Conflating the two is the most common and most consequential error in this area.
Online coverage typically starts in the late 1990s or 2000s depending on the court's digitisation programme. Older matters exist in paper or microfiche at the courthouse or in provincial archives and require manual retrieval. Any honest report states the date range each source actually covered.
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