I would like to update my honourable colleagues today on the steady increase in online usage rates by clients for our Companies and Deeds Online, or CADO, system.

CADO first came online in January 2005. In the three years since, a number of services have been put online for the convenience of clients. These services include reserving corporate names, incorporating businesses or organizations, filing annual return documents, filing notice of registered office documents, notifying change in directors, obtaining certificates of good standing and searching the registry of companies. Not only can clients conduct business at any time, day or night from anywhere in the province, they have the certainty that records are updated immediately and documents will arrive on time and not be returned for incomplete information.

It is for these reasons that we have seen a remarkable rate of use for CADO for each corporate document type that can be filed online. When the Department of Government Services brought CADO online, clients filed almost six per cent of their documents with the system. In just three short years, we are now seeing over 25 per cent of documents filed online. In addition, there have been a steady high percentage of clients who avail of obtaining certificates of good standing immediately from their own computers. In January, 300 of 368 certificates were purchased online which is over 80 per cent.

In addition to services for corporate clients, CADO also offers search services for the Registry of Deeds and the Mechanic�s Lien Registry. I am confident we will continue to see online use increase as we offer more services online. In the near future, we will digitize corporate records that exist solely in paper format up to June 2004 and we will incorporate some smaller registries into CADO.

One of this government�s commitments from day one was improving access to e-government. I am very pleased that we are reaching this commitment in our commercial registries and we will continue to look at ways to improve online service for our CADO clients.

2008 03 12                                                    2:25 p.m.