What a service dog record is actually for
We have a page telling you that registration is not required anywhere in Canada, and another explaining which parts of this industry are dishonest. Both are true and we are not softening either.
This is the other half of the answer: what a record is genuinely good for, once you have stopped expecting it to be a permission slip.
The distinction the whole industry blurs
A status is something the law gives you. A record is something you keep.
Nothing we issue changes your rights. Your rights come from your province's human rights and accessibility legislation, and they exist whether or not you have ever heard of us.
What a record does is answer questions — from a vet, a landlord, an assessor, a boarding kennel, a stranger holding your dog's collar at the side of a road. Those questions get asked constantly. Almost none of them are legal questions.
Six reasons people keep one
1. A task record is the document that describes what your dog does
Where a business is permitted to ask about your dog at all, the question in most provinces is whether the animal is trained to assist you with a disability. Not your diagnosis. Not a demonstration. (Ontario is different — there the permitted document is a letter from one of nine health colleges, and a task record is not what a business may ask for.)
A clinician's letter establishes that you have a disability. A provincial certificate establishes that you passed an assessment. Neither one describes what your dog does.
A task record does exactly that. Where your province issues a card, carry the card; the record is what stands behind it. We have a whole page on what counts as a task and how to write it down.
2. A record made early is worth more than the same record made late
This is the reason we would give first if you only read one.
A training log with entries dated across eighteen months, written as the training happened, is evidence. The identical information typed up the week after a landlord says no is an account. They are not treated the same by anyone assessing them — a human rights commission, a residential tenancy board, a condominium's counsel.
You cannot go back and create a contemporaneous record. That is the entire point of one, and it is why the useful time to start is long before you need it.
3. Preparing for a provincial assessment
If you live in Alberta, British Columbia or Nova Scotia, your province runs a real program, and you should apply to it. None of the three is expensive, and none is quite free for an owner-trained team: Alberta's card costs nothing but its assessment is $50 for residents; BC's certificate costs nothing but the assessment most owner-trained teams must pass is $200; Nova Scotia's assessment is $187.50, and the fee may be waived for people on income support.
Those programs assess a team, and the assessment goes better when your training hours and tasks are written down rather than remembered. Alberta's training standard sets a minimum number of hours and a minimum number of trained tasks — arriving with a log is a different experience from arriving with an estimate.
Our record is not a substitute for those programs and never will be. It is the thing you bring to them.
4. Your dog gets loose
Every profile carries a QR code. Someone who finds your dog scans it with a phone camera and reaches a page showing your dog's name, photo and registration status — and an emergency contact, if you have chosen to display one. No app, no account, nothing to install. Nothing else about you or your dog is on that page; your documents and details stay private to your account.
A phone number scratched into a tag is legible until it isn't. A scannable code that resolves to a page you control is a different kind of thing, and it is the one benefit here that has nothing to do with any of the law on this website.
5. Vets, kennels, boarding, dog walkers, sitters
Routine, and the most-used part of any record in practice.
Someone needs your dog's date of birth, microchip number, vaccination history or veterinary contact, and you are there but not in a state to recite it — or you are on the phone from somewhere else. Those details live in your private record, not on the public scan page, and you can pull them up in seconds. It is unglamorous and people use it constantly.
6. One place for the documents that do carry weight
Your health care provider's letter. Your provincial certificate, if you have one. Your training school's paperwork. Vaccination and veterinary records.
Those are the documents that actually do something, and they are useless in a moment where you cannot find them. Standing at a rental viewing or a boarding desk is the worst possible time to be searching an email archive.
We hold them so you are sending a link.
About the card
The registration card is digital. It sits in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet the way a rewards card does, and you can download it, or print it and laminate it yourself. A QR tag for the harness is a separate, optional item. Here is precisely what the card is.
What it is. Something to show someone instead of explaining yourself — on your phone, or on paper. A durable registration number that stays the same if you move provinces or change vets. A scannable link to your dog's public profile and, if you have switched it on, what your dog is trained to do. The optional tag on the harness means a stranger can identify your dog and, if you have turned it on, reach your emergency contact.
What it is not. It is not proof of anything a government has decided. It does not change what a business may ask you — that is set by your province, and we have written every one of them up. In Alberta, BC and Nova Scotia the card that carries evidentiary weight is the one your province issues, and you should get that one.
We will not tell you what happens after you hand ours over, because we do not know and neither does anyone else selling one.
What we will not claim
- That our record is required. It is not, anywhere in Canada.
- That it grants access to any premises.
- That it makes your dog a service dog. Training does that.
- That an airline will accept it. Canada's accessible transportation regulations contemplate identification from the organisation that trained the dog, which we are not.
- That it changes a landlord's obligations. Housing turns on your health care provider's evidence.
If any of those things were true we would say so, loudly, because they would be worth far more than what we actually sell.
So who is this actually for
People who own-train, and have no school to vouch for them, so their own log is the only record that will ever exist.
People approaching an assessment in Alberta, BC or Nova Scotia who want to arrive organised.
People whose documents are currently spread across an email account, a drawer and a vet's filing system.
People who want a tag on the harness that works when the dog is loose and they are not there.
Last reviewed: 6 September 2026. This is general information, not legal advice.