PCs defend corporate registry

Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government is defending its glitchy new online corporate registry that Bay Street law firms warn could drive businesses out of Ontario.

“What we have done is modernize a 30-year-old, paperbased process,” Government and Consumer Services Minister Ross Romano told the legislature Thursday.

As first disclosed by the Star on Thursday, 16 of Canada’s top law firms have complained the month-old Ontario Business Registry’s “system shutdowns, technical glitches and substantive problems” are forcing companies to incorporate out-ofprovince.

They banded together to fire off a 12-page letter to Romano noting it is “is negatively impacting our firms, clients and service providers” and is “having a chilling effect on doing business in Ontario in general.”

But the minister insisted the online registry is an improvement upon the old system that would see businesses “literally have to fill out boxes of paperwork and then lug these boxes of paperwork in to service counters, wait in line, only from Monday to Friday, nine to five.”

“You can do a transaction now in 16 seconds that used to take 16 weeks and you don’t have to hire a high-priced lawyer any more,” he said.

Last Friday, the firms wrote him to say many of them “are now recommending to their lawyers and clients that the creation or use of Ontario entities in corporate transactions be avoided if possible.”

They said they were recommending registration with “federal entities or other provincial jurisdictions … in order to not jeopardize the successful completion of many year-end transactions.”

NDP MPP Catherine Fife (Waterloo) said Romano was “modernizing businesses right out of Ontario.”

“Aside from the obvious political embarrassment for this government, getting this right actually is very important,” Fife said.

Developed by Teranet and op- erated by the Ontario govern- ment, the new registry system has processed more than 120,000 transactions since its

Oct. 19 launch. Fees range from $25 to dissolve a business to $150 to register a not-for-profit entity to $300 for incorporation of a business.

The law firms complain that the system crashes during business hours and there are datamigration and document-formatting issues.