Canadian Court Data: Federal, Provincial, and Territorial Coverage
DocketLayer covers 25 Canadian courts across the federal system and all major provinces and territories. Canadian court data presents different access challenges than US federal courts — portal quality varies significantly by province, bilingual obligations shape data presentation, and some jurisdictions have commercial data agreements that gate public access.
How Canadian Courts Are Organized
The Canadian court system has three tiers relevant to DocketLayer. At the federal level: the Federal Court (trial division), the Federal Court of Appeal, and the Tax Court of Canada handle matters of federal law — immigration, intellectual property, federal regulatory disputes, and tax. These courts have relatively consistent electronic portals.
Below the federal level, each province and territory maintains its own court hierarchy, typically: a superior court of first instance (e.g., the Supreme Court of British Columbia, the Court of King's Bench of Alberta), an intermediate court of appeal, and provincial lower courts. Superior courts — roughly equivalent to US state superior or circuit courts — are DocketLayer's primary coverage tier at the provincial level. Lower provincial courts are excluded.
Federal Court Coverage
All three federal courts carry full coverage: the Federal Court of Canada (fct), the Federal Court of Appeal (fca), and the Tax Court of Canada (tcc). These courts maintain public electronic portals with consistent case record structures, making real-time docket access reliable across all case types they handle.
Provincial and Territorial Courts
Seven provincial superior courts carry full coverage:
- Supreme Court of British Columbia (
bc_sc) - Court of Appeal for British Columbia (
bc_ca) - Court of King's Bench of Manitoba (
mb_kb) - Manitoba Court of Appeal (
mb_ca) - Court of King's Bench of New Brunswick (
nb_kb) - Court of Appeal of New Brunswick (
nb_ca) - Court of Appeal for Ontario (
on_ca)
The remaining active provincial and territorial superior courts carry partial coverage, reflecting the practical limits of each province's public portal — either in terms of the case types exposed, the completeness of docket entries, or the consistency of the data structure. Call GET /v2/status for the current status of any specific court.
Bilingual Support
Canada's federal courts and courts in officially bilingual provinces operate in both English and French. DocketLayer supports this through the language parameter on case queries. Pass language=fr to receive normalized docket data with French-language field values and case descriptions where the underlying source data supports it. The default is language=en. For courts that do not have bilingual portal data, the language parameter has no effect on the response content.
Access Limitations
Two Quebec courts — the Cour supérieure (qc_cs) and the Cour d'appel (qc_ca) — are fully integrated and indexed but carry planned status. Quebec court data is managed by SOQUIJ, a provincial data broker that requires a commercial agreement for bulk access. Queries to these courts return a 422 until the agreement is in place.
The Supreme Court of Canada, the Cour du Québec, and all provincial lower courts below the superior court level in any province are excluded from coverage. The Supreme Court of Canada handles a small number of leave applications and appeals annually; DocketLayer's focus is on the trial and intermediate appellate level where case volume and monitoring value are highest.