About ViaOttawa
- businesses and places listed
- 19,683
- categories
- 63
- neighbourhoods
- 110
- guides and articles
- 654
What this is
ViaOttawa began as a blog about the city and is now two things that belong together. The first is a directory: somewhere to look up a business in Ottawa and find where it is, when it is open, how to reach it and what it actually does, without wading through a page of adverts to get there. The second is the writing that was always here — guides, explainers and local news about events, neighbourhoods, history and the practical business of living in this city.
We are independent. We are not connected to the City of Ottawa, to any government department, board or agency, or to a chamber of commerce, and nothing published here is an official communication from one.
We are also small, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. The directory is built largely from public data, which means it has gaps and it has errors. What we can promise is that when you tell us about one, a person reads it and we fix it.
There are no reviews, stars or ratings on this site, and that is a deliberate choice rather than a missing feature. A rating system on a directory this size would be gamed within a month, and it would turn every conversation with a business owner into a negotiation about a score.
Where the information comes from
Most listings here were not written by the business they describe. Knowing which is which is the difference between a directory you can use and one you have to second-guess, so every page says where its facts came from.
- City of Ottawa open dataOpen Government Licence – City of Ottawa
- Business and facility records, and the food-premises inspection results shown on restaurant listings, exactly as the City publishes them and dated. Source
- Government of Canada open dataOpen Government Licence – Canada
- The Canada Revenue Agency list of registered charities, behind the charity facts on an organisation’s page. Source
- OpenStreetMapOpen Database Licence
- Places mapped by volunteers, shown beside our own records and always labelled. We never copy a value out of them into our own database — the licence asks that of anyone who uses it, and we keep the two apart. Source
- A business’s own websiteAttributed to the business
- Facts a business publishes openly — hours, services, answers to common questions — read from its site and credited to it. More
- Owners, and usWritten by the people named
- A business that adds or claims its listing writes its own details, and they take priority over everything above. The guides are written by our own writers. More
How it is paid for
See what a plan costsEvery business in Ottawa can be listed here for nothing, and most of them are. A business that wants more than a name and a phone number — its logo, photographs, a longer description, a direct link to its website and a better position in its category — pays for a plan, and that is what keeps the site running.
There are no adverts on this site, no analytics product following you around it, and nothing here is funded by selling anyone's information.
What money does not buy
It seems worth being blunt about this, because the reason people distrust directories is that the answer is usually different from the one on the page.
- It does not buy a result in Google. We do not control how search engines rank anyone and we do not sell ranking signals.
- It does not buy an endorsement. Nothing on a paid listing says the business is good, safe, licensed or verified, because we have not checked any of those things about anybody.
- It does not buy coverage. Paying does not get a business into our guides, and not paying does not keep it out.
- It does not buy protection. A paid listing is corrected, and removed, on exactly the same terms as a free one.
The full version of all of that is in the terms, which is where it is binding rather than merely stated.
What we will not do
Four things we have committed to in the terms and built into the site, so they are not left to our good intentions on the day.
- A correction is always free
- We have never charged to fix or remove a listing and we never will. If anyone asks you for money to correct a ViaOttawa page, it is not us — tell us about it.
- No reviews, no stars, no ratings
- We do not run a rating system, so there is nothing here for a competitor to game and no score for us to sell you protection from.
- Paid placement is labelled as paid
- A sponsored listing says so on its face, and a free listing is never hidden, demoted or degraded to make room for one.
- We do not sell your information
- Not to a data broker, not to a marketing list, not to anyone. Ever.
Tell us when we are wrong
A closed business still listed, hours that changed last spring, a phone number that rings somewhere else, a page about you that should not exist — all of it is worth an email, and none of it costs anything to fix. If the listing is yours, you can also claim it and edit it whenever you like.