The short answer
Yes, you can. Registering a business name provincially is not the same as owning a trademark. Under the Trademarks Act, only registration gives the exclusive right to use a mark throughout Canada for the registered goods or services. Your business name, and your website advertising it, can infringe someone else's registered mark.
Here is the version of this story that plays out constantly. Someone registers a business name with their province, buys the matching .ca, has a sign made, letters a truck, builds a website, and trades happily for five or six years. Then a letter arrives from a law firm in Toronto or Vancouver about a registered trademark they have never heard of. The name has to go.
What went wrong was not the name. It was the assumption that the paperwork which let them open the business was the paperwork that protected the name. Those are two different registries answering two different questions, and only one of them is about rights.
What registration actually confers
Start with the operative provision, because almost everything else follows from it. Section 19 of the Trademarks Act says that, subject to sections 21, 32 and 67, the registration of a trademark in respect of any goods or services, unless shown to be invalid, gives the owner the exclusive right to the use throughout Canada of that trademark in respect of those goods or services [1].
Read that carefully, because two halves of it are doing work. Throughout Canada - not in the owner's city, not in the owner's province. And in respect of those goods or services - the right is scoped to what was registered, which is why an identical word can peacefully belong to two different businesses in genuinely unrelated fields.
Registration runs for an initial period of 10 years from the day of registration, renewable for further 10-year periods when the renewal fee is paid in time [1]. CIPO puts it in plainer words: when you register, you get the sole right to use the mark across Canada for 10 years, renewable every 10 years [2].
Nothing in that section is triggered by incorporating, by registering a trade name, or by owning a domain. Those things get you an entity, a filing and an address. They are not the mechanism the Act uses to hand out exclusive rights.
Why the business-name registry is not the trademark registry
Federal incorporation is a useful illustration. The Canada Business Corporations Act requires that a corporate name carry a legal element - Limited, Incorporated, Corporation, or an abbreviation such as Ltd., Inc. or Corp. [5]. It also provides that a corporation shall not be incorporated with, change its name to, have, carry on business under, or identify itself by, a name that is prohibited by the regulations or that does not meet the prescribed requirements [5].
That is a screening rule for the corporate register. Passing it means your name was acceptable to that register on that day. It is not a grant of the exclusive right to use throughout Canada, because the Act that grants that right is a different one [1].
CIPO is direct about the distinction. A trade name is the name of your business, and it can be registered under the Trademarks Act only if it is also used as a trademark - that is, used to identify goods or services [2]. Their example: if your ice cream company is A.B.C. Ltd. but customers know the product as "North Pole", then A.B.C. Ltd. is functioning as a trade name and not as a trademark [2].
The searching problem compounds it. CIPO notes that the Registrar does not register trade names, that trade names can be recorded separately in each province under provincial legislation, and that there is therefore no single, complete list of trade names in Canada [2]. So a clean check against your own province's registry proves considerably less than it feels like it proves.
The three hooks that can actually reach you
There is not one route to trouble here. There are several, and they have different requirements.
Infringement. Section 20 deems the registered owner's right to exclusive use to be infringed by a person not entitled to use the mark who sells, distributes or advertises any goods or services in association with a confusing trademark or trade name [1]. That last phrase is the one people miss. Your business name is squarely capable of infringing someone's registered mark. There is a narrow exception for bona fide use of your own personal name as a trade name, and for bona fide non-trademark use of the geographical name of your place of business or an accurate description of your goods - but only where that use is made in a manner not likely to have the effect of depreciating the goodwill attaching to the registered mark [1].
Depreciation of goodwill. Section 22 says no person shall use a trademark registered by another person in a manner likely to have the effect of depreciating the value of the goodwill attaching to it [1]. This one is not framed around confusion at all. It is the provision to remember before you write comparative marketing copy that leans on a well-known name.
Passing off. Section 7 prohibits, among other things, directing public attention to your goods, services or business in such a way as to cause or be likely to cause confusion in Canada between yours and another's; making a false or misleading statement tending to discredit a competitor's business, goods or services; and passing off other goods or services as those ordered or requested [1]. Nothing in section 7 requires the complaining party to hold a registration. An unregistered but long-established local competitor can still make your life difficult.
And on the misleading-claims side, the Competition Act makes it an offence to knowingly or recklessly make a representation to the public that is false or misleading in a material respect, for the purpose of promoting a product or any business interest [4]. The same conduct is separately reviewable on the civil track [4]. A name or tagline that implies an affiliation you do not have is not purely a trademark problem.
What "confusing" means, and how a court decides
Confusion is a defined term, not a vibe. Section 6 provides that the use of a trademark causes confusion with a trade name if the use of both in the same area would be likely to lead to the inference that the goods or services associated with them are manufactured, sold, leased, hired or performed by the same person - whether or not they are of the same general class [1].
In deciding, a court or the Registrar must have regard to all the surrounding circumstances, including the inherent distinctiveness of the marks or names and the extent to which they have become known; the length of time they have been in use; the nature of the goods, services or business; the nature of the trade; and the degree of resemblance between them in appearance, in sound, or in the ideas they suggest [1].
Two practical consequences. A made-up or arbitrary name scores well on inherent distinctiveness; a generic descriptive one scores poorly, and the Act separately bars registration of marks that are clearly descriptive of the character or quality of the goods or services, or that are primarily merely a name or surname [1]. And "in appearance, sound, or ideas suggested" is broader than a string match, so the fact that your spelling is different is a weak defence.
Two things that cut in your favour
It is not all one-directional. First, prior use counts for something. Entitlement to registration can be defeated if, at the filing date or date of first use, the applicant's mark was confusing with a trademark previously used in Canada, an earlier-filed application, or a trade name previously used in Canada by another person [1]. If you were genuinely there first and can prove it, you are not defenceless.
Second, section 21 allows the Federal Court, in proceedings respecting certain registered trademarks, to permit continued use of a confusing trademark or trade name in a defined territorial area concurrently with the registered mark, where a party other than the registered owner had used it in good faith in Canada before the filing date and the Court considers concurrent use not contrary to the public interest [1].
There is also a use requirement that bites registrants. If, within three years beginning on the date of registration, the owner brings a claim under section 19, 20 or 22, they are not entitled to relief unless the mark was in use in Canada at some point during that period, or special circumstances excuse the absence of use [1]. Registration is not a parking spot.
The honest concession: sometimes the right move is to accept the risk
If you run a single-location business with an ordinary descriptive name - a bakery, a barber shop, a small trades company serving one town - and you have no plan to expand beyond your region, no plan to franchise, and no plan to sell branded product outside your area, then a full clearance search plus an agent plus a filing is a real amount of money for a risk that may simply not materialize. That is a reasonable risk to accept, and I would rather say so plainly than pretend everyone needs a registration.
What you should not do is skip the free half. Searching the database costs nothing but an evening.
Why searching early is cheap and searching late is not
CIPO calls a search of existing trademarks a good first step, notes you do not have to do it, and then says outright that if similar trademarks exist, you could end up infringing on someone's trademark, which could land you in court [2]. They also advise searching trade names, because trade names are often used as trademarks even when unregistered [2], and they suggest checking the variants - different spellings, and the French equivalents of the words in your mark [2].
The asymmetry is the entire argument. Doing it before you name the business costs an evening and zero dollars. The government filing fee, if you decide to register, is $458.00 for the first class of goods or services filed online, plus $139.00 for each additional class as of the filing date; $597.00 for the first class if you file another way; and $555.00 online to renew the first class ten years later [3]. Someone opposing your application pays $1,040.00 to file a statement of opposition [3].
Now price the alternative. Doing it late means new signage, new vehicle lettering, new packaging, a new domain, new email addresses, reprinted everything, and the quiet loss of every link, review and directory listing pointing at the old name - plus whatever the other side's lawyers want. That is the gap this article exists to point at.
Where your website sits in all this
Your site is not a bystander. The Act deems a trademark to be used in association with services if it is used or displayed in the performance or advertising of those services [1]. Your website is the most public, most indexed, most easily archived advertising you own. It is evidence of your use, and it is the first thing anyone building a file on you will screenshot.
Which is also why a website you can actually change matters more than it sounds. If a name has to change, the site should be the cheap part of the change - text, logo, domain redirect - not a rebuild.
Do this this week
Open the Canadian Trademarks Database and search your business name. Then search it again the way CIPO suggests: obvious misspellings, singular and plural, the French equivalents of any real words in it, and the distinctive part on its own without your city or your legal element [2]. Then search your own province's business-name registry, and the registries of any province you sell into, remembering there is no complete national list of trade names [2]. Write down what you find and the date. If nothing close comes back in your field, you have a defensible record that you looked. If something does, you have found it while the only thing you have to change is a draft.