A PPSA registration search runs a debtor’s legal name against a province’s personal property registry to surface every financing statement registered against it — the single fastest way for a buyer’s counsel to see which of a target’s assets already have a secured creditor standing behind them.
Every common-law province’s Personal Property Security Act runs on the same debtor-name architecture. British Columbia’s version sets it out under Part 4 — Registration: s. 42 establishes the personal property registry itself, s. 43 governs registering a financing statement against the debtor, and s. 48, “Registry searches,” is what a buyer’s counsel actually runs. A search returns every live registration against the exact legal name searched — which is why counsel searches not just the target’s current legal name but any predecessor name, trade name and, on an asset purchase, the individual seller’s name where relevant, since a registration filed against a name the target no longer uses will not show up on a search of the current one at all.
Quebec runs a materially different system — a civil-law property regime rather than a PPSA — and nothing here should be read as describing how a Quebec search works; that has to be confirmed separately with Quebec counsel. Within the PPSA provinces, what a clean search actually proves is narrower than it looks: it shows what is registered, not what is discharged in substance but not on paper, and not what should have been registered but never was. A search is the start of the diligence question on a target’s encumbrances, not the end of it.
A search against a target’s exact legal name returns three registrations. One matches a specific equipment lease the seller disclosed and is straightforward. The second is registered against a nearly identical but not exact predecessor name the target used before a 2019 amalgamation — caught only because counsel searched that name too, not just the current one. The third is a purchase-money security interest an equipment financier registered against “all present and after-acquired equipment,” a much broader collateral description than the seller’s own list of financed assets suggested. None of the three is fatal to the deal, but all three change what “free and clear” needs to mean in the purchase agreement, and none of them would have surfaced from the seller’s own representations alone.
See also: Discharge of a security interest · Bulk sales legislation · Corporate minute book.
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