Not by default, if your company qualifies to waive it — but a lender or a surety can put the decision back on the table.
Short answer
No, not automatically. A privately held Canadian corporation can legally skip an audit if every shareholder signs off each year. In practice a bank covenant or a bonding facility often pushes a growing contractor toward heavier statements anyway, because the lender or surety carries the exposure.
Under the Canada Business Corporations Act, s.163, “the shareholders of a corporation that is not a distributing corporation may resolve not to appoint an auditor.” The waiver applies only to a non-distributing corporation (broadly, not a public company — the situation almost every trades or construction business is in), and it is not permanent: “a resolution … is not valid unless it is consented to by all the shareholders.” so a growing company re-decides this every year rather than setting it once.
The legal right to skip an audit and a lender accepting that choice are different things. “most loan terms and conditions have financial reporting obligations. You are required to provide financial statements and reports to the bank annually.” That obligation does not by itself specify an audit — a smaller operating line is often satisfied by lighter statements — but it is contractual, not optional, for as long as the facility runs. A surety reviewing a bonding application is reading the same numbers for a related but different question: not just whether the business can service debt, but whether it can complete the specific project being bonded.
The CBCA waiver depends on how your business is structured, which matters because the same question gets a different answer elsewhere on this hub. An Ontario condo corporation cannot vote its way out of an audit — every status certificate it issues must include “last annual audited financial statements and the auditor’s report” per the Condominium Authority of Ontario, with no unanimous-resolution equivalent. In practice, a contractor with modest bonding needs can often get by on lighter, compilation-level statements; once bonding capacity climbs into multi-million-dollar territory, expect the lender or surety to ask for more.
The CBCA waiver is specific to a corporation with shareholders. A sole proprietorship or partnership was never subject to a statutory audit requirement, so whatever assurance level it produces is purely what its bank or bonding relationship asks for.
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