Using a name as a search trigger and using it in the ad itself are two different questions — Canadian law is far more interested in the second one.
Short answer
No Canadian source found this session bans buying a competitor’s business name as an invisible Google Ads keyword outright. The real exposure sits in what your ad itself says: the Trademarks Act prohibits directing public attention to your business “in such a way as to cause or be likely to cause confusion” with a competitor’s (s.7(b)) — and an ad headline or description that borrows the rival’s name is far closer to that line than the keyword targeting behind it.
A Google Ads keyword is an instruction to the ad platform about when to show your ad — it is invisible to the person searching. The ad’s headline, description and display URL are what the searcher actually reads. Canadian unfair-competition and passing-off law is built around confusion in the mind of the public, so it is the visible text that carries the legal weight, not the trigger that surfaced it.
Section 7 of the Trademarks Act sets out four prohibitions, and (b) is the operative one here, verbatim: no person shall “direct public attention to his goods, services or business in such a way as to cause or be likely to cause confusion in Canada … between his goods, services or business and the goods, services or business of another.” This is the statutory version of the common-law tort of passing off, and it protects a business name whether or not it is registered as a trademark — an unregistered name still carries enforceable rights through actual use, just harder to prove without a registration certificate to point to.
If the ad text goes further than naming the rival — a comparative claim like “better than [Rival]” or a suggestion the ad is somehow affiliated with them — a second federal law applies: the Competition Act’s civil track (s.74.01(1)(a)) reaches any representation “false or misleading in a material respect,” and a performance claim shifts the burden onto you to have had an adequate and proper test before making it, not after being challenged.
Whether pure keyword-only bidding, with an ad that never mentions the rival by name, crosses the s.7(b) confusion line has not been settled by any source this page could fetch and read — Canadian case-law databases were unreachable this session. Treat the keyword/ad-copy distinction above as the operative reasoning, not as a guarantee, and get advice before running a campaign built specifically around a competitor’s brand name.
See also: how fast you should answer a web enquiry and what actually counts as consent under CASL
A 30-minute call is enough to flag the difference between aggressive marketing and a real compliance problem.
