Researching Canadian Companies for Free

Last week on Slaw.ca, Susannah Tredwell, the Manager of Library Services at Davis LLP wrote a piece about Researching Canadian Companies for Free that contains many useful tips.

She breaks down the process of researching companies into 3 steps:

• Determine what information are you looking for
• Is it a public company, a private company or a crown corporation?
• Jurisdiction? (i.e. federal or provincial)

She then describes the free research tools out there: company websites, Google Finance, Yahoo Business, Strategis (Industry Canada site), SEDAR (documents filed by public corporations), CanLII, court registries, even LinkedIn.

She concludes:

"These are just some of the resources available; depending on geographical location and what is being looked for, there may be other equally helpful resources not listed above. As I mentioned above, I also recommend checking with your local public library to see what databases they offer access to. That said, if you do a lot of company research, you will want to look into subscribing to one of the paid services that have already compiled and analyzed company data, as this will save you a lot of time."