A courtroom at the Edmonton Law Courts building on June 28, 2019.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
The Globe and Mail is expanding its Secret Canada project for the first time since it launched three years ago, now offering a comprehensive guide on how to access court records in different jurisdictions across the country.
This new tool lays out the basics of what kinds of records Canadians are entitled to access, and the process to obtain documents such as lawsuits, small claims files, bankruptcy records and daily dockets.
The guide provides this information for each province, territory and federal jurisdiction – and can be found on SecretCanada.com in the resources section.
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Up until now, Secret Canada has focused on Canada’s broken freedom of information (FOI) regime. FOI – which is also called access to information and right to information – is the process by which Canadians can obtain records from most publicly funded entities, including each level of government, police services, hospitals, universities, Crown corporations and transit agencies.
As part of the reporting, The Globe created SecretCanada.com, which features a database of hundreds of thousands of completed FOI requests as well as numerous guides for how to use, file and appeal FOIs.
Like FOI, there is no one Canadian court system. Each jurisdiction has its own rules and processes. Secret Canada’s new guide on accessing court records builds off a previous one that lays out the different FOI regimes in each part of the country.
The site also includes a letter generator with templates. In 2025, more than 5,200 people used the Secret Canada FOI generator.