No — each province regulates who may hold shares in a professional corporation through its own instrument, with a different list of eligible professions and a different scope of family relief, so a share structure that is unlawful in one province can be entirely lawful for the identical profession next door.
Short answer
No — each province regulates who may hold shares in a professional corporation through its own instrument, with a different list of eligible professions and a different scope of family relief, so a share structure that is unlawful in one province can be entirely lawful for the identical profession next door.
Ontario runs the carve-out as a regulation naming two professions: O. Reg. 665/05 exempts only physician and dentist corporations from the Business Corporations Act’s all-shares-same-profession rule. No other Ontario college, including optometry, is named.
Alberta runs the identical idea through its Health Professions Act itself, reaching four colleges at once. Section 106(1) lists “the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta…of the College of Dental Surgeons of Alberta…of the College of Chiropractors of Alberta, or…of the Alberta College of Optometrists” as the colleges whose corporations fall under the Act’s ownership regime, and section 109(1)(e.1) sets the non-voting family carve-out — spouse, common-law partner, child, or a trust for minor children — for all four, in one section.
British Columbia does not regulate profession by profession at all. Since April 1, 2026 its Health Professions and Occupations Act governs every designated health profession under one section: Section 59(1) requires all voting shares be held by an “eligible licensee”, and section 59(2) permits non-voting shares to go to a family member directly or to “held in trust by a trustee who is resident in Canada and approved by the board, on behalf of a trust” — a Canadian-resident, board-approved trustee, a route neither Ontario nor Alberta’s wording provides.
None of the three provinces is a safe proxy for either of the others, and the error runs in both directions — assuming a stricter province’s rule travels, or assuming a more permissive one does. Confirm which colleges the applicable province’s own carve-out actually names, by section, in the province where the corporation is permitted to practise, before treating a family shareholding as a defect or as settled.
Two buyers made the opposite mistake — assuming Ontario’s answer travelled — in Treadstone Academy’s Case Files: an Alberta dental corporation nearly forced into an unnecessary $70,000 share buy-back and a BC optometry corporation whose family trust needed no correction at all.
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