What a registry can and cannot do — and why we say so where it costs us

There are four things this site refuses to claim. Each refusal costs us sales, and we are not dropping any of them. One of them is written into the disclaimer that sits above the fold on every page where we sell anything; all four are things our assistant, Scout, is required to say plainly, and rules every page in the law library is written under.

In plain words, the four:

• Registration is not required anywhere in Canada.
• Nothing we issue creates or confers a legal right.
• There is no national Canadian standard for service dogs.
• We do not sell clinician letters.

This is the post explaining why, what is left once you accept all four, and why the disclaimer goes at the top of a page rather than the bottom.

The four, one at a time

Registration is not required anywhere in Canada. Not with us, not with anyone. Alberta, British Columbia and Nova Scotia run their own programs, and Alberta's card is free. Prince Edward Island has passed a Service Dog Act whose commencement we have not been able to confirm, and until it is in force PEI works like the provinces without a program. Everywhere else, access comes from human rights, accessibility and service-animal legislation rather than from a registry, and it turns on the dog's training and your need. The provinces differ enough on this that it is worth reading your own: the full picture, province by province.

Nothing we issue creates or confers a legal right. We are a private company. We can no more grant your dog entry to a restaurant than a gym can grant you a driving licence. What we issue is a record: a registration number, a dated account of training, a card, a profile behind a QR code. A record is evidence of something you did. It is not permission.

There is no national Canadian standard. This one gets sold hard by other people, so it is worth being exact about. In 2015 Veterans Affairs Canada contracted the Canadian General Standards Board to establish national standards for mental health service dogs. In the department's own words: "In 2018, the Board notified technical committee members that it had withdrawn its intent to produce a National Standard of Canada for Service Dogs, as there was no consensus among the committee members that the standard could be achieved." The Board has since stopped this kind of work: as of 1 April 2026 it no longer offers standards development or conformity assessment services, though the standards it already published remain available at no cost.

So when a site advertises "nationally recognized" registration for Canada, there is no nation-level thing doing the recognizing. It is not an exaggeration of something real. It is a description of something that does not exist.

We do not sell clinician letters. A letter that carries weight comes from a regulated health professional who knows you — that is the entire basis of it. A registry that has never met you cannot write one, whatever it is called at checkout. What a valid letter contains, and who may write one.

So what is left?

A fair question, and the honest answer is: the part that was always the product.

A number and a record that exists before you need it. Your dog has a registration number, an issue date and a status. That record was created on a day, and it says so. A record that existed before you needed it is, at the very least, a record that existed before you needed it — and that, not any promise about how a case will go, is the reason to start one early.

A dated account of the training. The Taskbook holds what the dog is trained to do, when it was first trained, and by whom. What a business may ask varies a good deal by province: in some it is a question about what the dog is trained to do, in Ontario it is a vest or harness or a letter from one of nine named regulated health professions, and in Alberta, British Columbia and Nova Scotia a business may ask to see the provincial card — though only Nova Scotia requires you to carry one. What a business may ask, province by province. Where the question is about training, a task record answers it directly. What counts as a task, and how to write one down.

Something to hand over. A card on your phone or in your pocket, and a public profile behind a QR code. Many people at a door have never been told what a service dog is. A card gives you something to hand over instead of an argument to have.

A profile you control. Every field on the public page except the record itself — the number, the date, the status, and whether the registration has been revoked — is a switch you own, and you can switch the whole profile off. The dog's specific assistance-work sub-type is never among the fields shown: every one of them collapses to plain "service", so psychiatric service and autism support read identically to a stranger.

The one thing on that page that can say more is task text, and it takes two deliberate switches to get there. The Taskbook is off the public profile by default, every individual task is off by default, and both have to be turned on before a task's name and description appear. Nothing else from the Taskbook ever appears — no dates, no hours, no trainer, no proficiency rating, and never the disability-related need field. We say this plainly rather than promising that a scan can reveal nothing, because a task description you choose to publish can say a great deal, and that choice should be made knowing it.

One place for the documents that do carry weight. Vet records, a trainer's attestation, a clinician's letter you already have. We do not write those. We keep them together, privately, so they exist as a folder rather than as four photographs in a camera roll.

That is a real product. It is not a permission slip, and everything above is what it is instead.

Why the limits go at the top of the page

Two reasons, and the first is not the law.

A disclaimer at the bottom of a page is not a disclaimer. It is a legal decoration. If a page spends nine paragraphs implying that a document gets you through a door and one line at the very bottom saying it does not, the nine paragraphs are the message. Our disclaimer sits above the fold on the home page and every product page, on the order page before you pay, on the card artwork itself, and on the public profile page. Where a disclaimer sits only in the footer, we do not think it is doing the work it is meant to be doing.

The second reason is that Canadian law puts the burden on us, not on you. The Competition Bureau states the rule for performance claims plainly: "Under paragraph 74.01(1)(b) of the Competition Act, you cannot make a claim about a product's performance, its effectiveness, or its length of life, unless you can prove that the claim is based on an adequate and proper test." It adds that "the test must have been done before the claim is made." Note which way round that runs — a seller does not get to make the claim and wait to be disproved.

Which is why you will not find a number anywhere on this site about how often a card works at a door. We do not have one, so we do not have an adequate and proper test, so we do not make the claim. Any registry advertising an acceptance rate faces the same question: where is the test?

There is also a newer wrinkle worth knowing about, whichever side of the counter you are on: since 20 June 2025, deceptive marketing is one of the things a private party can seek leave to bring before the Competition Tribunal. It is no longer only the regulator who can act on a misleading claim.

What you are actually buying

A record that you keep, dated, with a number on it, for a dog that really does the things it says.

Register the dog with us and the honest sentence at a door is: my dog is registered with ServDog, its training is on record, and this is what it is trained to do. That is a true sentence, and it does not need any of the four claims we refuse to make. Everything we sell is on the true side of that line, because the other side of it is not a product — it is a story that falls apart the first time someone checks.

Last reviewed: 9 September 2026.