Canada Court Records: How to Search Every Province and Territory

Canada has no single national court-records search: the Supreme Court of Canada and the Federal Court both run genuine public online case-search tools, but at the provincial and territorial level online access ranges from British Columbia's fully public Court Services Online to Saskatchewan's complete absence of any online portal, with Prince Edward Island's own online-docket status unresolved rather than confirmed either way, and everywhere in the country, youth records stay closed under the federal Youth Criminal Justice Act while a publication ban never opens just because a file was found.

Information last verified on 2026-08-15. This article has not yet been reviewed by a licensed lawyer.

The Open-Court Principle: Why Canadian Court Records Are Public At All

Canadian courts start from a presumption of openness, not privacy. The Supreme Court of Canada states the rule plainly in its own plain-language guidance: "As a general rule, court proceedings are open and public. This is known as the open court principle and is protected by the right to freedom of expression guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The open court principle serves to instill public confidence in the justice system... On occasion, there are necessary restrictions on the open court principle. This can happen when there is a publication ban or an order sealing the file." Every provincial and territorial court access policy linked from this hub restates some version of that same rule, and most cite the same underlying Supreme Court of Canada case law to do it.

The current controlling formulation of when a court may restrict that openness comes from Sherman Estate v. Donovan, 2021 SCC 25, a unanimous decision written by Justice Kasirer. At paragraph 38, the Court recast the earlier two-step Sierra Club test as three prerequisites a person seeking a restriction on court openness must establish: "(1) court openness poses a serious risk to an important public interest; (2) the order sought is necessary to prevent this serious risk to the identified interest because reasonably alternative measures will not prevent this risk; and, (3) as a matter of proportionality, the benefits of the order outweigh its negative effects." Only when all three prerequisites are met, the Court continued, may a discretionary limit on openness, such as a sealing order, a publication ban, an order excluding the public from a hearing, or a redaction order, properly be ordered. The decision is explicit that this is a restatement of prior law, not a new test: it is "recasting" the Sierra Club framework "around these three core prerequisites... without altering its essence," building on Sierra Club of Canada v. Canada (Minister of Finance), 2002 SCC 41, Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. v. Ontario, 2005 SCC 41, and Canadian Broadcasting Corp. v. New Brunswick (Attorney General), [1996] 3 SCR 480. The open-court principle itself is constitutionally grounded in section 2(b) of the Charter, the guarantee of freedom of expression.

This is the test that shows up, sometimes cited by name and sometimes just applied in substance, in nearly every provincial and territorial access policy referenced across this site. Nunavut's own Access to Court Records Policy uses language close enough to Sherman Estate's three-part test to suggest the SCC's formulation is the template territorial and provincial policies are built from, not a coincidence of similar wording.

Where Canada's Federal Courts Let You Search Online

Supreme Court of Canada

The Supreme Court of Canada runs a genuine public, no-login case-tracking tool at scc-csc.ca/cases-dossiers/search-recherche/. It lets anyone search by case number, case name (full or partial), lower-court file number, or jurisdiction of the lower court, including every province, Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and the federal Court Martial Appeal Court and Federal Court of Appeal. The result links to docket information showing the steps taken so far in the proceeding, a list of parties and counsel, and a case summary. This is a national index of what stage a case is at; CanLII, by contrast, generally functions as a decisions archive rather than a case-file search.

The SCC's own Access to Court Records Policy, effective March 17, 2015, states plainly at section 5.3 that "there are no fees for consulting a case file." Remote access through the website, covering judgments on appeal, docket information, factums, webcasts, and case summaries, needs no staff assistance; a separate "mediated access" track exists for anything requiring Registry help, and a "registered access" tier, renewable every 12 months, exists for people who need regular access to multiple files without filing a fresh request each time. The policy also carves out the same sensitive-proceeding categories every provincial policy references: cases under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, family law proceedings, and child welfare proceedings may all carry limits on access.

Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal

fct-cf.ca (the domain the Federal Court's institutional site now redirects to) runs the most powerful public case-search tool found among any court described on this hub, federal or provincial: a single interface covering both the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal, searchable by last name, corporation name, ship name, court file number, intellectual-property reference, or related case, with a dropdown to scope the search to either court or both. Results include the court file number, the names of all parties and legal counsel, the filing date and city, related cases, and a summary of case history described as "Recorded Entries," meaning the actual docket, not just a judgment archive.

A distinction matters here that is easy to miss. The search tool itself appears to function as a general docket-metadata lookup with no date or subject-matter restriction. Actual document downloads, the pleadings and court-generated documents themselves, are narrower: a September 2022 pilot project makes online document downloads available only for matters commenced on or after September 12, 2022, only in Maritime and Admiralty, Class Actions, Indigenous Law, and Intellectual Property matters, and only where no confidentiality or sealing order applies. Documents in older matters, or outside those four practice areas, remain available the way they always were, through the Registry, not online. The pilot's own notice cites Sherman Estate v. Donovan, 2021 SCC 25 at paragraph 80 directly, reasoning that even a non-sealed record can raise privacy or security concerns from the loss of "practical obscurity" once it moves from paper-at-a-registry to searchable online, which is why a party can separately request an exemption from online posting specifically, without needing a full sealing order.

The Federal Court's own Tariff A fee schedule covers proceeding fees (filing a statement of claim runs $2 to $150 depending on the type of action) but lists no separate search or copy fee the way several provincial and territorial schedules do, and the Court Files search tool itself presented no fee prompt.

Where Can You Actually Search Online? All 13 Provinces and Territories

Portal existence is the fact that matters most on this hub, and it varies sharply by jurisdiction. The table below states only what each province or territory's own portal, guide, or policy confirms, matched to the province-specific guide linked from each row.

A portal's silence on a case type is a channel limit, not proof the underlying record is closed. Every jurisdiction above that excludes a category from its online tool, British Columbia's Supreme Court criminal files, Manitoba's Provincial Court, New Brunswick's criminal and family cases, and so on, still allows access to that same record in person or by mail through the registry that holds the file, subject to whatever family, youth, sealed-file, or publication-ban restrictions apply in that province. See the linked province-specific guide for exactly how that in-person or written process works, and its fees.

Youth Records: The Federal Layer Every Province Defers To

Every province and territory's youth-record restrictions trace back to the same federal statute, the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), so this hub covers it once rather than each spoke re-deriving it.

Section 118 sets the general rule: no one may be given access to a youth record except in accordance with sections 119 through 124, meaning access is closed by default and opened only through specific, enumerated exceptions. Section 119 lists who may access a record during the applicable "access period," a length tied to the type of disposition and ranging from a few months for extrajudicial measures to several years for an indictable conviction, with the clock resetting if the young person reoffends. The people permitted access include the young person, their counsel, the victim, a peace officer conducting an investigation, a court, and, with more restriction, a member of the public who satisfies a judge they have a valid interest and that access is desirable in the public interest. Section 128 governs disposal of the record once the access period ends; records generally may no longer be kept once access is no longer permitted, subject to archival exceptions.

A separate pair of sections, 110 and 111, imposes the general publication bans: no one may publish information that would identify a young person dealt with under the Act, or a child or young-person victim or witness. These publication-ban provisions are legally distinct from the sections 118 through 128 access provisions. A publication ban restricts what may be reported publicly even where a record itself is technically accessible to a person permitted under section 119; a records-access restriction controls whether a search tool or registry shows the file at all. A hub explaining "why a youth's name does not appear in a court file lookup" needs to point to the right mechanism depending on which behaviour is being described: a search tool declining to return a result at all is an access restriction, while a media outlet being barred from naming someone even after attending the hearing is a publication ban.

This federal layer is why every province's youth-record treatment looks similar even though each province writes its own access guide: British Columbia's youth files show only a file number, next appearance date, and custody status without a judge's order; Alberta forwards public and media youth-record requests to a youth court judge; Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island all exclude youth matters from whatever online or telephone access exists; Ontario excludes Youth Criminal Justice Act matters from its online criminal search and from access to hearing audio recordings; Quebec layers its own Youth Protection Act closed-hearing rule on top of the federal youth-record restriction; and in the territories, Northwest Territories' appearances tool omits restricted parties such as youths by design, while Nunavut's access policy withholds a young person's name even from the phone-available information a member of the public could otherwise get for an adult case.

Court Records Are Not a Criminal Record Check

Every guide on this site makes the same distinction, and it is worth stating once here too. Searching a court file, whether through a provincial portal, the SCC's case search, or the Federal Court's Court Files tool, looks up a specific proceeding by name or file number in the court system. It is not the same product as a police-issued criminal record check, which pulls from police and RCMP databases rather than court files and is the correct tool for employment and background-screening purposes. None of the tools described on this hub, or in any province-specific guide linked below, are built or intended for tenant or employment screening, and using a court-records search that way risks missing context a formal record check is designed to capture.

Publication Bans: Finding a Record Is Not Permission to Publish It

A publication ban restricts what a person may publish or broadcast about a proceeding; it does not restrict whether the underlying record can be accessed at all, and access and publication are treated as legally distinct concepts by every court referenced on this hub. Several provincial portals flag a known ban on a case, but Ontario's own tool warns explicitly that it "may not reflect a publication ban that was recently granted," so a missing flag is not proof no ban exists. Breaching a publication ban is an offence regardless of how the underlying information was obtained, and the responsibility for knowing about and complying with a ban falls on whoever accesses or repeats the information, not on the court that granted access to the file. Finding a record online or at a registry counter is never, by itself, permission to publish what it contains.

Province-by-Province Guides

Each guide below covers that jurisdiction's actual court structure, current portal, official fees, and access restrictions, sourced independently and verified as of 2026-08-15.

• Ontario
• British Columbia
• Alberta
• Saskatchewan
• Manitoba
• Quebec
• Nova Scotia
• New Brunswick
• Prince Edward Island
• Newfoundland and Labrador
• Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut

Disclaimer

This hub is for general information only and is not legal advice. Court access rules, portal availability, and fees change by jurisdiction and by year, and several facts on this hub carry a specific hedge worth repeating: Yukon's login-gated docket tool could not be confirmed from outside it, so it is described as unconfirmed rather than assumed absent or assumed public; Nunavut's dockets.nunavutcourts.ca currently loads only over an unencrypted http connection, not https; and whether the SCC's case-search tool is formally, explicitly stated as fee-free (as distinct from the inference that its remote-access channel carries no separate charge) rests on the structure of the Court's own policy rather than a single verbatim sentence saying so. Each province-specific guide linked above carries its own additional hedges and unconfirmed points, listed in that guide's own disclaimer. A publication ban restricts what may be published from a court record, not what may be accessed, and breaching one is an offence regardless of how the underlying record was obtained. Confirm current procedures, portal availability, and fees with the relevant federal, provincial, or territorial court registry before relying on anything in this article.