Canadian Registry Lookup

Asks the regulator. Now. And tells you when it asked.

You give a name or a licence number. It queries the regulator's own public register at that moment and returns what the register says — with the UTC timestamp of the actual query and the URL of the source.

No stored copy is ever served as an answer. A verification that quietly returns last week's snapshot is worse than no verification: licences are suspended on Tuesdays too, and the person relying on your check is the one who pays for it.

{
  "registry": "reco-on",
  "verdict": "on_register",
  "matches": [{
    "name": "Allison LANE Guthrie",
    "category": "Broker",
    "licence_number": "4715694",
    "status": "REGISTERED",
    "expiry": "2026/11/06",
    "firm": "SIMCOE HILLS REAL ESTATE INC.",
    "address": "301 Laclie St. Unit: 2 Orillia, ON L3V 4N9 CANADA",
    "phone": "705-325-6262"
  }],
  "match_count": 1,
  "as_of": "2026-08-11T04:36:45+00:00",
  "source": "https://registrantsearch.reco.on.ca/",
  "source_live": true,
  "regulator": "Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO)",
  "billable": true
}

Registers covered

Slug	Regulator	Who	Requires
reco-on	Real Estate Council of Ontario	salespersons and brokers	city
bccohp-bc	BC College of Oral Health Professionals	six oral health professions	profession
cpspei-pe	College of Physicians and Surgeons of Prince Edward Island	physicians	name
cotbc-bc	College of Occupational Therapists of British Columbia	occupational therapists	name
acot-ab	Alberta College of Occupational Therapists	occupational therapists	name
bccsw-bc	BC College of Social Workers	social workers	name
lss-sk	Law Society of Saskatchewan	lawyers	name
mvma-mb	Manitoba Veterinary Medical Association	veterinarians	name
nbds-nb	New Brunswick Dental Society	dentists	name
acsw-ab	Alberta College of Social Workers	social workers	name
cap-ab	College of Alberta Psychologists	psychologists	name
cdhm-mb	College of Dental Hygienists of Manitoba	dental hygienists	name
cdhs-sk	College of Dental Hygienists of Saskatchewan	dental hygienists	name
clpnm-mb	College of Licensed Practical Nurses of Manitoba	licensed practical nurses	name
clpnnl-nl	College of Licensed Practical Nurses of Newfoundland and Labrador	licensed practical nurses	name
clpns-ns	College of Licensed Practical Nurses of Nova Scotia	licensed practical nurses	name
cotm-mb	College of Occupational Therapists of Manitoba	occupational therapists	name
cphm-mb	College of Pharmacists of Manitoba	pharmacists	name
cpsnb-nb	College of Physicians and Surgeons of New Brunswick	physicians	name
cpsnl-nl	College of Physicians and Surgeons of Newfoundland and Labrador	physicians	name
cpta-ab	College of Physiotherapists of Alberta	physiotherapists	name
cptbc-bc	College of Physical Therapists of British Columbia	physical therapists	name
cptnb-nb	College of Physiotherapists of New Brunswick	physiotherapists	name
crnm-mb	College of Registered Nurses of Manitoba	registered nurses	name
crnnl-nl	College of Registered Nurses of Newfoundland and Labrador	registered nurses	name
crns-sk	College of Registered Nurses of Saskatchewan	registered nurses	name
nlchp-nl	Newfoundland and Labrador College of Health Professionals	allied health professionals	name

Every one of these was queried live while building this, and every one is re-checked by validate.py, which asks all of them in one pass and prints which answered. A register that is in the table but silent is worse than one that is missing — the buyer assumes it works. So the table is what survives that check, not what was once found.

RECO returned 83 registrants for Orillia in a single request; BCCOHP returned 267 denturists for British Columbia; the nursing colleges answer by name.

Last full validation: 13 August 2026 — 27 of 27 registers answered, in 90 seconds. Re-run it yourself with python3 validate.py.

Twenty-five of the twenty-seven run on Alinity, a platform used by 45+ Canadian health regulators — so the same adapter reaches far more registers than are listed here. Adding one is a row in a table, not new code. They are added on request rather than in bulk, because every register added is a permanent maintenance obligation.

Verdicts

verdict	Meaning	Charged
on_register	Listed, and the regulator publishes standing	yes
on_register_status_not_published	Listed, but this regulator shows standing only on the detail page — not the same as "in good standing"	yes
not_found	The register answered and has no such record	yes
ambiguous	Several records match; narrow by licence number or city	yes
source_unavailable	The regulator did not answer, or a required field was missing	no

You are charged per completed check, not per match. A confirmed "this person is not on the register" is usually the exact answer you came for. You are never charged when the regulator fails to answer — that is our problem, not your bill.

Why the required fields are not optional

RECO's register refuses an empty city — that is their rule, not ours, and a tool that quietly substituted "Toronto" would be inventing an answer. BCCOHP requires a profession because its six professions are separate registers behind one form.

If you do not know the city, you can supply a routing index (see below) and the lookup will find it locally, then still ask the regulator for the answer itself.

What this tool will not do

• It will not read standing where the regulator does not publish it. BCCOHP shows discipline history and standing on a per-person detail page; the search results do not carry it. The verdict says so explicitly instead of implying good standing from mere presence in a list.
• It will not defeat a captcha. The Law Society of BC deliberately puts a captcha in front of member email addresses. That is a considered decision by a regulator about its members' data, and it is respected here — which is also why LSBC is not in the table above.
• It will not invent a field. Where the source leaves something blank, the answer is null. A fabricated licence number is worse than a missing one, because a missing one gets checked.

Usage

As an Apify Actor

{
  "registry": "reco-on",
  "people": [
    { "name": "Allison Lane Guthrie", "city": "Orillia" },
    { "licence_number": "4715694", "city": "Orillia" }
  ]
}

Set listRegistries: true to get the catalogue instead of running checks.

From the command line

python3 cli.py --registries
python3 cli.py --registry reco-on --name "Allison Lane Guthrie" --city Orillia
python3 cli.py --registry bccohp-bc --name "Ahmed Abu-Omar" --profession denturist
python3 cli.py --in people.jsonl --out checked.jsonl --registry reco-on

Optional: routing index

If you already hold a bulk export of a register, point the tool at it:

$export REGISTRY_INDEX_DIR=/path/to/exports    # expects <slug>.jsonl

The index answers exactly one question — which city should I ask about — when the caller does not know it. Nothing from the index reaches the answer: not the status, not the licence number, not the address. Those come from the live query or not at all. Loading a 97,000-record export takes about three seconds.

Manners

One request at a time, answers cached for the run, and a gap between calls. Checking a hundred people from one city is one request to the regulator, not a hundred. These registers are published under professional regulation statutes for exactly this kind of check; hammering them would be both rude and self-defeating.

Two details learned the hard way, both on 13 August 2026:

The rate limit is per platform, not per host. Twenty-five of these registers run on the same Alinity installation base. Pacing requests per subdomain — as this tool first did — is not pacing at all: a sweep across twelve of them knocked over half, and registers that had answered a minute earlier started failing. The gap is now counted across the whole platform.

A refusal is not a dead register. A full pass over the catalogue ran fine for 21 requests and then failed on every remaining one — a cumulative limit, not six broken regulators. All six answered normally on retry. Requests now back off and retry rather than reporting the register as unavailable, because a client checking fifty people should not be told that half the country's colleges are offline.

Fragility, stated up front

These are scraped HTML forms, not documented APIs. Regulators redesign pages without notice, and when that happens the adapter raises an error naming the register rather than returning an empty result. Silence that looks like an answer is the one failure mode this tool refuses to have.

Observed during development: one regulator on the Alinity platform changed its category values between 2 and 10 August 2026 and began returning zero records for a previously working query. It is not in the table above for that reason.

License

MIT.