Terms of use

We are a directory, not a referee.

Being listed here is not a recommendation, a rating or a check of anyone's credentials. We do not run reviews or stars.

Most listings were not written by their owner.

They come from public data. Details go out of date. Verify anything that matters before you rely on it.

If a listing about your business is wrong, we will fix it.

Claim it and edit it yourself, or write to us and ask for a correction or removal. There is no charge for either, ever.

A paid plan buys placement and features on this site, and is labelled as paid.

Featured and Spotlight listings come first in their lists, and Spotlight can come first in our own search and assistant, marked Sponsored. A plan does not buy a review, an endorsement, protection from a correction, or any result in Google.

Plans renew until you cancel.

On a yearly plan we email you 14 days before each renewal. Cancel any time and the plan runs to the end of the period you paid for.

This summary is here to be read, not relied on. Where it and the numbered sections below differ, the numbered sections are the agreement.

Via Ottawa ("ViaOttawa", "we", "us") publishes a directory of Ottawa businesses and organizations together with guides and news about the city, at viaottawa.ca and its subdomains. We operate from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and you can reach us at info@viaottawa.ca.

These terms apply to everyone who uses the site: someone looking up a business, a business owner who adds or claims a listing, and anyone who holds an account or pays for a plan. By using the site you agree to them. If you do not, please do not use it.

We are an independent publisher. We are not affiliated with the City of Ottawa, the Government of Canada, or any agency, board or official body, and nothing here is an official communication from one. Where we republish information from a public body, we say so and we link to the source.

A listing is a record of a business: its name, where it is, how to reach it and, where we have it, facts like opening hours, services and accessibility. That is all it is.

A listing is specifically not:

• an endorsement or a recommendation. We do not vouch for anyone's work, pricing, safety, insurance, licensing or conduct;
• a check of credentials. We do not verify licences, certifications, registrations or memberships, and the presence of a business in a category does not mean it is qualified to work in it;
• a rating. There are no stars, scores or reviews on this site, and the order of results is not a judgment of quality. Featured and Spotlight listings are placed first, and how placements are shown says exactly where;
• professional advice. Nothing on the site, including our guides and our assistant, is legal, medical, financial, immigration, tax or safety advice. If you need advice, get it from someone qualified to give it to you.

Choosing and dealing with a business is between you and them. Any contract, payment, dispute, injury or loss that arises from that dealing is not ours, and we are not a party to it.

Records on this site come from four kinds of source, and we label which is which:

• Open government data — City of Ottawa open data (including food-premises inspection results) under the Open Government Licence – City of Ottawa, and Government of Canada data such as the Canada Revenue Agency list of registered charities under the Open Government Licence – Canada;
• Open map and place data — OpenStreetMap, shown under the Open Database Licence, and Overture Maps Foundation data under CDLA-Permissive-2.0;
• A business's own website — facts published openly on it, such as hours, services and answers to common questions, read from it by software and attributed to that website;
• People — a business owner who adds or claims a listing, or our own editorial work.

Where a business has not written its own description, we may write a short one from the facts shown on its page, with the help of an AI model.

Most listings on this site were not written by the business they describe and were never approved by it. Nothing in a listing should be read as a statement the business itself made to you, unless the page says the business supplied it.

Food-premises inspection results are published by the City of Ottawa and shown here exactly as the City publishes them, with the date of the inspection. They describe one inspection on one day. They are not our opinion of a business, and they say nothing about it today.

We take reasonable care, and the site will still contain errors. Opening hours change, businesses move and close, public datasets lag, and a fact read from a website in one month may be wrong the next. Verify anything that matters before you act on it — call ahead, check the business's own website, and confirm anything to do with money, safety, health, accessibility or legal status at its official source.

If a listing about your business is wrong

We would rather fix it than argue about it. You have three routes, and none of them costs anything:

• Claim the listing and edit the details yourself;
• write to us with the address of the page and what is wrong, and we will correct it;
• ask us to remove the listing entirely. We will, unless we are required to keep publishing it — and where the information came from a public dataset, we will also tell you that removing it here does not remove it from the source.

We never charge for a correction or a removal, and we never will. Anyone who tells you otherwise, in our name or any other, is not us — please report it to us.

Anyone may submit a business. When you submit or claim one, you confirm that the details are accurate to the best of your knowledge, that the business is real and operating in the Ottawa area, and that you are the owner or are authorized by the owner to act for it.

Every new listing and every edit is screened automatically before it appears. One the screen is unsure about waits for a person; one it passes appears at once, and a person reads it afterwards. Changes to a paid listing are always read by a person before they appear. We may decline, hold, edit or later remove any submission, including for the reasons under acceptable use, and we do not have to explain our reasoning in detail.

A claim is verified by email: control of a listing is granted only after the address on the claiming account has been verified and the claim approved. This is a reasonable check, not a guarantee of ownership. If you believe someone else holds a listing for your business, tell us and we will investigate and, where we are satisfied, move it.

Claiming, editing and holding a free listing costs nothing. Approval is not certification: see what a listing is, and what it is not.

A free listing shows a business's name, address, phone number and hours, and appears on its category and neighbourhood pages like any other. It stays free: no card, no expiry.

Three paid plans add more to a listing — currently Professional at $79 a year, Featured at $179 a year, and Spotlight at $529 for the first year and $229 for each year after, in Canadian dollars. Spotlight's first year includes a website we design and build for the business; each renewal keeps it online and includes one update a year when you ask (see your Spotlight website). What each plan includes, and the price on the day, are set out on the pricing page, which is the version that governs a purchase.

Billing

• Payments are taken by Whop. We do not see or store your card number. Prices are in Canadian dollars, and no HST is added.
• A plan is paid for a year at a time and renews automatically for another year until you cancel. We email a reminder 14 days before each renewal. A Spotlight plan renews at $229; if it ends and you buy it again within 60 days, you pay $229 rather than the first-year price, because we kept your website. You must be of the age of majority where you live, and able to act for the business, to buy a plan.
• You can cancel at any time with Manage plan on your dashboard, from the Orders page of your Whop account, or by writing to us at info@viaottawa.ca. Cancelling stops the next renewal; the plan continues to the end of the period you have already paid for.
• We do not refund the unused part of a period, with these exceptions. If you were charged in error, we refund the charge. If the plan did not deliver what the pricing page said it would, or we withdraw or clearly reduce something it included (see how placements are shown), we refund the unused part of the period. Write to us and we will put it right.
• If you move to a higher plan part-way through a year, the unused part of what you paid for the lower plan is added to the higher one as extra days, and the lower plan is then cancelled, so you do not pay for both at once.
• If a payment fails, the listing keeps its plan while Whop tries the card again. If the payment still does not go through, or a plan ends, the listing returns to a free listing. Your logo, your own description, website link, email, social links, Verified mark and Spotlight extras stop being shown, the listing leaves the paid places on the site, and a Spotlight website is paused. None of the listing is deleted: it comes back when you renew, and the Verified mark comes back once a person has checked the listing again if the last check is out of date. A paused Spotlight website is deleted 60 days after the plan ends.

How placements are shown

We decide how paid placements look and where they sit on a page: their design, size, position, order and rotation, and how many are shown at once. We change them as the site grows. For example, when many businesses share a plan we may show them in turns, in pages, by area or by category, or move a placement to another part of a page or to another page.

Paying changes where a listing appears, and we say so where it happens:

• Featured and Spotlight listings are placed above free and Professional listings in their category and neighbourhood lists, and ahead of them in a search on ViaOttawa that they match equally well. In a list, a Spotlight listing carries its plan's name and a Featured listing is marked Sponsored. A Professional listing is placed exactly as a free one is.
• When a search on ViaOttawa or a question to our assistant matches a Spotlight listing, by its name, its description or its category, up to two Spotlight listings can be shown first, marked Sponsored. A listing that does not match what was asked is never shown there because it pays, and the assistant is told never to call a business better because it is sponsored.
• The bands and boards that show paid listings on the home page, on category and neighbourhood pages and beside our articles are marked Sponsored.
• Free listings stay in every category, neighbourhood and search list they belong to, and are never removed from one to make room for a paid listing. The assistant shows only a few places at a time, so a Sponsored place it shows first can take the last place another would have had. A Spotlight listing's own page does not show other businesses in its category.

• A position is shared and is never guaranteed. Listings on the same plan take turns, and none is promised the first place.
• What the pricing page listed on the day you bought a plan keeps its substance for the period you have paid for. If we stop providing one of those things altogether, or change it so that it is clearly worth less, we will tell you, and you may cancel and get back the unused part of the period.

We may change prices. A change never affects a period you have already paid for. A higher price applies to a plan you already hold only after we have emailed you about it at least 30 days before the renewal it applies to; until then, you renew at the price you were paying.

Nothing in these terms takes away a right you have under the Consumer Protection Act, 2002 (Ontario) or any other law that cannot be waived by agreement.

A Spotlight plan includes one website that we design and build for your business, and keep online while the plan runs. It is set out here so that you know exactly what is included before you buy.

What we build

• One website of up to 5 pages (for example Home, About, Services, Gallery and Contact), in English, from one design, using your listing and the content you send us.
• The pages show information. A page may link to your booking, ordering or map pages elsewhere. It is shown at an address on viaottawa.ca, with a link back to your listing.
• Once it is live, you may connect a domain you own (a www address) at no extra cost. Buying, renewing and managing that domain, and its DNS, are yours to do.
• Not included: a contact or booking form, a shop or payments, a blog, logins, more pages, another language, custom features, or a new design. We can build these as extra work, quoted and paid for separately; they are never part of the plan.

Before it goes live

• Send us your content (text, and anything we should know) by email within 30 days of buying. Your photos and logo come from your listing. After that, we build the website from your listing.
• We aim to show you a preview within 10 business days of your content (or of the end of the 30 days). The preview is hidden from search engines.
• You may ask for up to 3 rounds of changes, sent within 14 days of your first preview. Each round is one message listing every change you want. A new design, a new page or a feature not included above is extra work, not a change; we will tell you when a request is, and it does not count as a round.
• We put the website live when you are happy with it, or once the rounds or the days are used.

After it is live

• While the plan runs, tell us when your business details change (such as your phone number, email, address, hours or prices) and we update the website, usually within 5 business days.
• Keeping details up to date does not include a redesign, new pages or new features; those are extra work, quoted separately. We may grant one more round of changes ourselves; that is our choice and does not change what the plan includes.

Who owns what

Your text, photos and logo stay yours, and you give us permission to use them on your website. The design, code and templates are ours, and you may use them on your website while the plan runs.

When the plan ends

If the plan ends, the website is paused: visitors see a page that points to your listing. If you renew within 60 days, it comes back as it was. After 60 days it is deleted, with its address on viaottawa.ca. We do not export it. Buying Spotlight again after that starts a new website.

This section is as important to us as it is to you, so it is short and plain. A paid plan buys a place and a richer page on this site. It does not buy:

• any result in Google or another search engine. We do not control how search engines rank anyone, and we make no promise about them;
• a number of visitors, calls, enquiries or customers. We report what we measure and we promise none of it;
• a review, an endorsement or a badge of quality. There is no paid tier on this site that says a business is good, safe or legitimate, and the labels we use for paid placement say what they are. The Verified mark, which only Featured and Spotlight listings show, means one thing: on the date it gives, a person checked that the phone number and website belong to the business and that the account holding the listing controls them. It says nothing about quality, safety, licensing or conduct;
• editorial coverage. Paying does not get a business into our guides or news, and not paying does not keep it out;
• protection from a correction, a removal, or the enforcement of these terms. A paid listing is corrected on exactly the same terms as a free one.

Paid placements are shown as paid, and how placements are shown sets out where paying puts a listing first.

You need an account to claim a listing, edit one or hold a plan. You must give a real email address you control, keep your password to yourself, and tell us promptly if you think someone else has got into your account. What happens under your account is your responsibility.

One person may act for several businesses, and several people may not share one account for the same business — control of a listing follows the account that verified it.

You can ask us to close your account at any time. Closing it releases the listings you hold; it does not delete the listings themselves, because most of them exist independently of any account. We keep the record of any payment for as long as the law requires.

"Your content" means anything you give us: listing details, a description, a logo, photographs, the text of a message, and anything you type into the assistant.

You keep ownership of your content. By sending it, you tell us that:

• you own it or have permission to use it, including for any photograph you upload;
• publishing it here breaks no one's copyright, trade mark, privacy or other right;
• it is accurate and not misleading about the business it describes.

You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce, adapt for display, and publish your content on the site and in the ordinary promotion of the site, for as long as the listing is published. You can end that licence by removing the content or by asking us to remove it. Copies may persist for a while in backups and in search-engine caches we do not control.

We do not sell your content, and we do not license it on to other directories.

The site as a whole — our writing, guides, photographs, page design, code, the way the directory is organized, and our compilation of it — belongs to us or to our licensors, and is protected by copyright. You may read it, link to it, and quote a reasonable amount of it with attribution and a link.

You may not, without our written permission:

• copy, scrape, harvest or otherwise extract the directory or a substantial part of it, by hand or by machine, including for training a model or building a competing dataset;
• use automated tools on the site beyond what our robots file allows;
• place the site or any part of it behind another interface, framed or otherwise presented as someone else's;
• use our name, wordmark or logo in a way that suggests we endorse, verify or are connected with a business.

Some of the underlying data carries its own licence and its own freedoms. Data from OpenStreetMap is available under the Open Database Licence and City of Ottawa and Government of Canada data under their Open Government Licences — go to those sources and take it from them on their terms. Our own compilation is not covered by any of those licences.

The site has an assistant that answers questions about places, businesses and neighbourhoods in Ottawa using our own listings and articles. It is a convenience, and you should treat what it says the way you would treat the rest of the site: as a starting point to check, not an answer to rely on.

• It can be wrong. It can miss a business, name one that has closed, or state something a source does not support. Verify anything that matters.
• It is not advice and it is not a person. It does not give legal, financial, medical, immigration or safety advice, and it cannot make a booking, a purchase or a complaint for you.
• What it shows is not a recommendation. Which places it shows follows from your question. When a Spotlight listing matches your question, it may be shown first and marked Sponsored, because its owner pays us; the assistant is told never to call a place better because it is sponsored.
• Please do not type sensitive personal information into it. Conversations are kept and can be read by our administrators, and your question is sent to our model provider. The privacy policy sets out exactly what is kept and for how long.

Do not use the assistant to attack the site or anyone else: no attempts to extract our prompts, keys or data, no automated querying, no abuse, and no using it to generate content that breaks the rules on acceptable use. We may rate-limit or block a browser or network that misuses it.

Do not use this site to:

• break the law, or help someone else to;
• list a business that does not exist, is not in the Ottawa area, or is a front for something else; or to list someone else's business as your own;
• publish anything false, defamatory, harassing, hateful, obscene, or anything that infringes another person's rights;
• advertise, spam, or harvest contact details for marketing;
• impersonate anyone, including us, or misrepresent your connection with a business;
• interfere with the site: probing, scanning, overloading, circumventing a security or rate-limiting measure, or uploading anything harmful;
• get at an account, listing or part of the site you are not entitled to.

We may remove content, suspend an account, unpublish a listing or block access when we reasonably believe this section has been broken, when we are required to, or to protect the site and the people who use it. Where it is practical and lawful, we will tell you and give you a chance to answer.

The site links to businesses' own websites, to public datasets and to other sites we do not control. A link is not an endorsement, and what happens on the other end is not ours: it is governed by that site's own terms and privacy practices.

We also rely on services we do not control — payments, email delivery, hosting, bot protection, maps and the model behind the assistant. We choose them with care, and we cannot promise they will always be available or free of error. The privacy policy names them.

If you believe something on the site infringes your copyright or another right you hold, write to info@viaottawa.ca with:

• your name and contact details;
• the address of the page, and which part of it you mean;
• what you own, and what makes you the owner or the owner's agent;
• a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorized by you, your agent or the law.

We look at every notice, and we remove or disable anything we conclude is infringing. A notice that is knowingly false wastes both our time, and may carry its own consequences for the sender.

To the fullest extent the law allows, the site and everything on it are provided "as is" and "as available", with no warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title or non-infringement.

In particular, we do not warrant that:

• any listing, fact, hour, price, inspection result or answer is accurate, complete or current;
• the site will be available, uninterrupted, secure or free of error;
• a defect will be corrected, or that the site is free of harmful components;
• a business listed here is competent, licensed, insured, solvent or safe to deal with.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. Where that is so, this section applies as far as the law permits and no further, and it does not affect rights you have under consumer protection law that cannot be waived.

To the fullest extent the law allows, ViaOttawa and the people who work on it are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for any loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill, data or opportunity, arising out of or in connection with the site — however caused, and even if we were told that such loss was possible.

This includes loss arising from your reliance on anything published here, from an error or omission in a listing or an answer, from the site being unavailable, and from your dealings with any business you found through it.

Where we are found liable despite the above, our total liability for all claims in any twelve-month period is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in that period and one hundred Canadian dollars ($100 CAD).

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for fraud, for fraudulent misrepresentation, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence, and nothing limits a right you have under consumer protection legislation that applies to you and cannot be waived.

You agree to indemnify and hold ViaOttawa harmless against any claim, liability, loss or reasonable cost (including reasonable legal fees) arising from content you submitted, from your use of the site, from your breach of these terms, or from your infringement of someone else's rights. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and will not settle it without talking to you first.

We are still building this site. We may add, change, suspend or withdraw any part of it, including a plan or a feature. If we withdraw something you are paying for, we will tell you and refund the unused part of your period.

We may update these terms. The date at the top of this page is the date the wording last changed. If a change materially affects a paid plan or how we handle your information, we will tell account holders by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it; if you do not, stop using the site and, if you hold a plan, tell us.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the laws of Canada that apply there, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. The courts of Ontario have jurisdiction, and we each submit to them. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in Canada, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory law of your own province.

Before going to court, please write to us. Nearly everything we have ever been asked about — a wrong address, a listing someone wants gone, a charge that surprised them — has been settled by email within a few days. We would much rather fix it.

Severability. If a provision is found unenforceable, it is limited or severed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stays in force.

No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision on one occasion, we have not given it up.

Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our consent. We may transfer ours to a successor of the business, on the same terms.

Whole agreement. These terms, the privacy policy and the pricing page as it stood when you bought a plan are the whole agreement between us about the site.

Language. These terms are published in English, and the English version governs. If we publish a translation, it is offered for convenience only.

Contact. Write to info@viaottawa.ca or use the contact form. We are in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.