It depends entirely on the regulator — Ontario's child care licensing statute disqualifies a partnership from holding the licence at all, while its liquor licensing regulation explicitly contemplates a partnership as the licensee.
Short answer
There is no single Ontario-wide rule on whether a partnership may hold a regulated business licence — each licensing statute answers it separately. The Child Care and Early Years Act disqualifies a partnership outright, with no size or ownership-share exception. The liquor licensing regulation goes the other way: it builds partnership licensees into its own transfer-trigger rules, meaning it assumes a partnership CAN hold the licence.
The Child Care and Early Years Act, 2014, s.20(4) sets out when the director must issue or renew a licence, and lists exceptions. Paragraph (b) is a flat disqualification: the director shall issue or renew the licence unless “the applicant is under 18 years old, is a partnership or is an association of persons.” CCEYA, s.20(4)(b) There is no partial exception for a two-person partnership, a small ownership share, or a passive partner — the applicant simply cannot be a partnership at all. Two individuals who want to operate a child care centre together and hold the licence jointly have to incorporate; the partnership structure they might otherwise default to is not available for this licence.
Ontario's liquor licensing regulation runs the opposite assumption. O. Reg. 746/21, s.154(1) para. 2 lists as a licence-transfer trigger: “A person becomes or ceases to be a partner of a licensee that is a partnership.” A regulation cannot list a trigger event for a partnership licensee's ownership changing unless a partnership can hold the licence in the first place — the liquor regime is built around partnerships as a normal licensee structure, rather than excluding them the way the CCEYA does.
Confirming whether the target holds, or can hold, its licence as a partnership has to be checked against the SPECIFIC governing statute, not assumed from a general Ontario corporate-law default or from how a comparable licence works in a different regulated sector. A buyer structuring an acquisition of a licensed business around a partnership vehicle needs to know, licence by licence, whether that structure is even eligible to be the licensee.
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