When it comes to investigating companies, it makes a huge difference
whether the corporation is publicly-traded or privately-held.
Securities regulators ensure that public companies report certain
types of information regularly. The best place online to find such
information for Canadian companies is www.sedar.com
But it's a completely different story for private outfits. There are
few mandatory reporting requirements. This means investigative
journalists have to be more resourceful.
A good place to check is with credit rating agencies. Equifax will
gladly prepare a report on a company, public or private, and offer it
for sale. These reports can provide a good idea of how promptly a
company is paying its bills, and how much litigation it might have on
its hands.
Corporate registries are another useful place to look. Companies
registered provincially or federally have to file basic information
about directors and, in some cases, ownership. The federal database is
online at Industry Canada's site, while provincial registries have to be checked individually.
It's sometimes worthwhile to track the activities of Canadians abroad
by checking on their corporate activities in different countries. This
can be done online in many cases, though language barriers might make
the task daunting for some countries.
Luckily, there are some sites that have aggregated this information in a user-friendly format. Open Corporates,
for example, has scraped data from dozens of countries and re-purposed
it to make searching simpler. So has the Investigative Dashboard's worldwide company data site.
A great article
by Sheila Coronel, of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism
at Columbia University, provides links to these and other useful places
for corporate research.