Keep It Local, Eh

This site traces retail and restaurant banners back to who actually operates and controls them — the parent company, its ownership structure, and its national origin, where that's a meaningful and knowable fact. The goal is to make that structure visible, not to tell you what to do with it. Store ownership and product origin are two different things, and this site only speaks to the former. For how much each one actually moves your money, see Made in Canada or Canadian-Owned?

Each brand gets a score from 0 to 5 maple leaves, in half-leaf steps. It's fully rule-based — every input is a sourced fact, not a judgment call — built from up to four weighted parts:

• Ownership & control — the share of voting control held by Canadian parties. This is deliberately about control, not just who owns the most shares — a company can sell most of its economic value to public or foreign investors and still be controlled by a Canadian founding family through a dual-class share structure, or the reverse.
• Financial flow — where the profit actually lands: corporate-owned, franchised, cooperative, and a few variations in between, and whether the parent collecting the royalty or margin is itself Canadian or foreign. A heavily franchised brand keeps more money with a local owner-operator even when its franchisor is foreign; a fully corporate-owned store sends the entire margin wherever its parent is.
• Operational footprint — separately from who owns or profits from a company, whether its real head-office work — design, product development, corporate jobs, decision-making — actually happens in Canada. A foreign-controlled company can still run substantial, genuine Canadian operations; a Canadian-founded one can end up with none. We check for the real thing rather than assuming either way.
• Manufacturing location — for the handful of brands that make a physical product, not just operate stores, the share of that manufacturing done in Canada.

Every score also carries a confidence level. Exact means the number comes from a clean, unambiguous case — a wholly Canadian-founded company, a wholly foreign subsidiary, or a documented voting-control structure. Estimated means a real number was assigned by informed judgment where a precise one wasn't publicly available — currently 69 of 338 parent organizations. Estimated doesn't mean unreliable, just not yet independently re-verified against a specific, dated source.

One deliberate limitation worth naming: the manufacturing factor only applies to brands that design and sell their own product line. A brand that's transparent about manufacturing overseas takes a real hit on that part of its score; a multi-brand retailer selling the identical imported item under someone else's label isn't asked that question at all, because this site scores the company you're buying from, not a shelf-by-shelf audit of everything a retailer carries. Two otherwise identical purchases can land on different scores because of that — we'd rather say so than leave it for you to discover on your own.

The maple leaf score is entirely rule-based — it never changes because of something a company did last week. But sometimes a company's actions genuinely deserve recognition or scrutiny in a way the ownership formula can't capture. That's what Eh+ and Eh− are for: a second, separate layer, always tied to a specific written article explaining exactly what happened and why it mattered.

Not every article that mentions a company results in an adjustment. A company can be referenced in an article purely for context — including cases where an early concern didn't end up warranted, such as a company reversing a bad decision before it became a pattern — and that article still shows up on the company's profile without moving its score. The adjustment only applies when the article itself makes the case for it.

This layer only grows if people flag things worth writing about. If you've seen a company genuinely support Buy Canadian, sponsor something meaningful, or do something worth scrutiny, email info@keepitlocaleh.ca with the story.

Every entry is built from public sources: corporate filings and investor disclosures, established news reporting, trade press, and company statements. Most brand profiles link their sources directly. Ownership changes, sometimes quickly — a few entries on this site have already changed hands more than once in recent years — so treat the "last verified" date on each profile as exactly that: when it was last confirmed, not a permanent fact.

This covers 496 companies so far, concentrated in a handful of categories — not a complete picture of Canadian retail. A couple of brands that make their own products are missing a manufacturing-location score entirely, shown as "not yet scored" rather than guessed at. And this is ownership structure only: it says nothing about a company's labor practices, environmental record, or anything else you might weigh in a purchasing decision.

This is an independent, informational project, not a warranted claim of fact about any specific company. If something here is wrong or out of date, that's expected to happen occasionally given how ownership structures change — email info@keepitlocaleh.ca and it gets looked at quickly.