Frequently Asked Questions

What is ClosedCorporations?

ClosedCorporations is a free public-service website that allows for exploration of out-of-date previously-public information about Prince Edward Island provincially and federally incorporated companies and their shareholders and officers in novel ways.

ClosedCorporations used to be called OpenCorporations: read more about why it changed its name.

The Province of Prince Edward Island has an online Corporate Register which serves a similar purpose, but has a limited set of search criteria — for example it does not allow for search by shareholder name.

Similarly, the Government of Canada has a Federal Corporation Search that allows search by corporation name, number and location, but not by director name.

Read OpenCorporations: Untangling the Corporate Web to learn more about the rationale behind the original project.

Is this an official source of information?

No.

I found a mistake!

This is old, out-of-date information. For provincial data, consult the Corporate Register, where the data was originally taken from on November 19, 2008, for up to date information; for federal data, consult the Federal Corporation Search, where data was last updated on December 20, 2008.

Additionally, because the Corporate Register doesn't keep track of individuals uniquely, but rather simply by name and address, it's possible that persons with common names — "George Macdonald," for example — can be mis-associated with a corporation simply because they share an identical name with someone else who actually is associated with a corporation. This is an unfortunate limitation of the Register that cannot, in its current form, be worked around.

Why aren't all businesses on Prince Edward Island listed?

ClosedCorporations only indexes incorporated companies, and it does not include any information on non-profit associations, limited partnerships, sole proprietorships, partnerships, cooperatives, insurance companies or credit unions. It also does not include any information on "extra-provincial" companies — companies operating in Prince Edward Island but incorporated elsewhere.

Where does this information come from?

ClosedCorporations took the data from the provincial Corporate Register on November 19, 2008 by "spidering" — an automated script acts like a web browser and accesses the search and individual corporation pages and pulls the information into a local database.

Federal corporation data came from the Federal Corporations Search on December 20, 2008 and was obtained in a similar manner.

Is the source code available?

For provincial data, yes. If you download pei-corporations-import.tar.gz you'll have the complete source code for the "spider" that crawls the Corporate Register and scrapes the corporations data into a location database. The script is written in PHP and depends on a MySQL database.

The scraped provincial data (as of November 19, 2008) for the corporations, officers, and trade names is also available as MySQL dump files.

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