Ontario’s reported private-equity total is a Toronto number wearing a provincial label — Ottawa’s own market runs on a dense IT corridor and a steady flow of professional-practice sales instead.
Market signals
Toronto’s $5.3 billion is 98 percent of Ontario’s reported $5.4 billion, on 70 percent of the province’s 30 named transactions. That leaves roughly $100 million spread across every other Ontario city’s named deals combined in H1 2026 — Ottawa is not named separately anywhere in the CVCA report, and no city-level figure for it exists in this dataset.
Two different geographies are both real here and worth keeping separate: the city of Ottawa’s 31,971 businesses and 1,017,449 people, versus the wider Ottawa–Gatineau census metropolitan area, which Statistics Canada’s February 2022 release of 2021 Census counts puts at 1,488,307 people in 2021, up 8.5 percent from 2016 — a growth rate that let the region “regain fourth place” among Canadian CMAs after briefly losing it to Calgary in 2016. The CMA figure includes Gatineau on the Quebec side; the business count does not.
Beyond the raw counts, treadstonelaw.ca’s Ottawa market profile describes “a dense IT and managed-services sector built around the Kanata tech corridor” alongside “a steady base of dental, medical and professional-practice sales serving the National Capital Region.” Most owner-run Ottawa deals close in 30 to 60 days on that source’s own account — professional-practice sales generally take longer.
A medical or dental practice sale in Ottawa is usually structured as a share purchase specifically to preserve college standing — CPSO for physicians, RCDSO for dentists — and existing client and patient contracts. That structuring choice interacts directly with the ETA s. 167(1) GST/HST election and, separately, with Ontario’s own ESA continuity-of-employment rules, which attribute a departing owner-employee’s tenure to the new owner if they stay on staff after closing.
A fund raising money from Ottawa-based investors needs to know that several of the NI 45-106 accredited-investor categories — paragraphs (a) through (d) and (f) through (i) — run through OSA s. 73.3(1) in Ontario specifically, not through the national Instrument text. The $1 million net-financial-assets and $200,000/$300,000 income tests in paragraphs (j), (j.1) and (k) apply the same way here as everywhere else.
The National Capital Region physically straddles Ontario and Quebec — Gatineau sits across the river. A target with Gatineau-side operations or a Gatineau-incorporated affiliate inherits the same Quebec sourcing gap covered on our Montreal page: this hub could not fetch Quebec’s own corporate or sales-tax statutes, and nothing about them is asserted here either.
Because the CVCA report attributes $5.3 billion of that $5.4 billion to Toronto by name, on 21 of the province’s 30 reported transactions. The remainder is not broken out by city, and Ottawa does not appear as a named line anywhere in the report.
Share deals are the norm specifically to preserve the practitioner’s college standing and existing patient contracts — Ontario’s employment-standards guide covers the underlying mechanics that go with it, from the GST/HST election to continuity of an owner-employee’s tenure.
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