The three legs, honestly: one gate scripted, two by hand
A tool that claims to check for name collisions and only actually checks one registry should say so. name-collision gate checks three places a Canadian business or brand name can collide, and only one of them, the CIPO Canadian Trademarks Database, gets queried automatically. The other two get an honest checklist line, never a silent gap and never a scraper pointed at a block.
CIPO: the one scriptable leg
The Canadian Trademarks Database answers a free, anonymous, plain HTTP JSON endpoint. No browser, no headless automation, ever, because none is needed: the same query-expanded, throttled request a person could send by hand is what the gate sends in code. This is the leg that returns a real PASS, FLAG, FAIL, or INCONCLUSIVE verdict.
OBR, the Ontario Business Registry: manual, never scripted
The live ONBIS portal sits behind bot mitigation, and its name search is also paywalled. Both are treated as hard constraints, not obstacles to route around. Because a manual paid search is real friction, the gate splits by what the name is for. A demo name, fictional and never actually trading, gets an honest waiver line: OBR was not performed, the residual risk is accepted, and the reasoning, weak exposure for a non-trading fictional name, is written into the evidence bundle in plain language. A real name, anything that will actually trade, requires evidence of the paid search before the gate will pass it; without that evidence, in check mode, the gate blocks even when CIPO comes back clean.
MRAS, Canada Business Registries: manual, never scripted
This leg is not blocked technically; it is off-limits by agreement. The registry's terms of service forbid automated search, so the gate never attempts it. Every check still emits a hand-run checklist line with a prefilled search URL, so the step is not forgotten just because it cannot be automated. For an Ontario name the line notes MRAS is redundant with OBR and offers it as optional cross-jurisdiction confidence; for any other province it is marked required.
Scope honesty
Even the scriptable leg does not claim more than it checks. It looks for near-exact collisions: normalized equality, plus the obvious Inc, Ltd, and singular or plural variants. Confusing similarity, two names that read alike to a person without matching exactly, is explicitly out of scope. That judgment belongs to a human or to counsel, not to a regular expression, and the gate says so rather than quietly pretending its narrower check covers the broader question.
Keep reading, then see the rest of the tooling.
- name-collision gate: what it is
- Why a literal search misses the obvious collision
- Verdicts and exit codes for a publish pipeline
name-collision gate runs today as an internal check in our own publish pipeline. It is not currently published as a standalone open source project.
See the rest of our honesty toolingFAQ
Why not just automate the Ontario Business Registry too?
The live ONBIS portal sits behind bot mitigation, a hard technical constraint, and its name search is also paywalled. Rather than build around either one, the gate treats OBR as a manual leg: an honest waiver for a fictional demo name, or a required paid search with recorded evidence for a real trading name.
Why is MRAS never scripted at all?
Its terms of service forbid automated search. That is a legal boundary, not a technical one, so the gate does not attempt to script around it under any circumstance. It still emits a hand-run checklist line with a prefilled URL so the step happens, just by a person.
What is the difference between a demo name and a real name here?
A demo name is fictional and never trades, so a collision has no goodwill or damages behind it and the OBR leg is honestly waived. A real name will actually trade, so the paid OBR search is required, and in check mode the gate will not pass a real-class name without recorded evidence of that search, even when CIPO is clean.
Does the gate judge whether two names sound alike?
No. It checks near-exact collisions only, normalized equality plus obvious legal-suffix and singular or plural variants. Whether two different-looking names are confusingly similar is a human or counsel judgment, explicitly out of scope.