If you search for “Texas tornado” in Google Maps or on the Public Alerts page, at the top of the search results beside the map you may find a link to an emergency alert from the U.S. National Weather Service concerning twister activity in Texas. We have not seen any Canadian content yet.

On the Official Blog for the site they indicate that this is a U.S. only site, “With today’s launch of Public Alerts on Google Maps, relevant weather, public safety, and earthquake alerts from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Weather Service, and the US Geological Survey (USGS) will be accessible when you search on Google Maps.”

Sales of large quantities of stock or the sale of assets and equipment of the business itself outside the regular course of business are considered a sale “in bulk”. The Bulk Sales Act is designed to protect the creditors of a business owner by requiring the owner to follow the procedures of the Act for sales outside the regular course of business.

If a buyer wishes to purchase the assets and equipment of a business, the seller “in bulk” must provide an affidavit stating that all creditors have been paid, or they will be paid from the proceeds of the sale.  In some cases the buyer pays an assigned trustee and creditors of the business may wish to waive their rights in which case the proceeds are paid.

A ‘Bulk Sales search‘ determines if a bulk sales affidavit has been filed with the relevant Ontario Superior Court of Justice office.

The Private Investigator (PI)

If you are interested in an Ontario business’s assets, debts, cash flow, and general financial condition, then a a Bulk Sale Act search is an important search.  It may tell you if the business is failing or if it has suffered a set-back.  You may learn of an abandoned line or the sale of a production facility.  You may learn of a legal action in another jurisdiction by contacting or researching the other parties to the bulk sale. Any sale that indicates that creditors will be paid from the proceeds of the sale may indicate a judgment that is being satisfied or it may be part of the settlement of a claim.

The Bank Act (1991, c. 46) is an Act of the Government of Canada respecting banks and banking.  The Canadian banking industry includes 20 domestic banks, 24 foreign bank subsidiaries and 22 foreign bank branches operating in Canada.

Canadian Banks & Lending

Canadian Banks have the right to lend money to wholesalers, retailers, shippers and dealers in “products of agriculture, products of aquaculture, products of the forest, products of the quarry and mine, products of the sea, lakes, and rivers, of goods, wares and merchandise, manufactured or otherwise” on the security of such goods or products, and to lend money to manufacturers on their goods and inventories.

The Private Investigator (PI)

When doing a background investigation of a person, the PI will be looking for previously unknown assets, banking and financial arrangements, or corporate affiliations.  When investigating a company, the PI will be looking for previously unknown assets, banking, and financial arrangements.  In both cases, the equity held by the subject in the assets will be of interest.  Searching the Bank Act Security Registry may reveal all of the above.

Bank Act Security Registry

Under S. 427 of the Bank Act, the borrower must sign a document that provides the bank with the first preferential lien on the goods or equipment.  The Bank then registers a ‘Notice of Intention‘ to take the goods as security, to perfect its security interest.

The Bank of Canada offers a Security Registry service which may be searched for registrations.  The search will reveal whether the Bank of Canada has taken security on property that may interest you.  If the Bank does have a claim on the property, then it means that it has loaned the customer money and that it has the right to take possession of and sell the property if the loan is not paid.  This is important for you to know for two reasons.  First, it shows that the person or business is indebted to a Canadian chartered bank and may have equity in the property listed in the security agreement.  Second, it may uncover previously unknown assets, banking and financial arrangements, or corporate affiliations. You will need to provide the name of the person or business being searched.

Years ago, we only did this when we suspected the subject person or company might have an interest in an agricultural business.  Today however, we find more non-agricultural businesses in the Bank of Canada registry. We have online access to the Bank of Canada registry to search for Bank Act Security items. The search results often indicate that a business assigned its inventory to a bank as security under the Bank Act.

A manual search for Notices of Intention filed under Section 427 of the Bank Act are conducted at the agency of the Bank of Canada in the province or territory where the debtor’s place of business is located. For Bank Act searches,  “agency” means, in a province, the office of the Bank of Canada or its authorized representative but does not include its Ottawa office, and in Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut means the office of the clerk of the court of each of those territories respectively [see S. 427(5)].

UPDATE: You won’t get very many Tweets using @topix_local compared to using TweetDeck and creating a column for #City.  But of course, in TweetDeck, you will get everything with the city hashtag, whether it’s news or not.

Doing this isn’t rocket science, so here is my current list of sites.  Of course, I have devised a way of automating the search process and I’m not going to tell you how I do that.  Just remember, you must document your search method and the results properly if this is could end-up as evidence.

Censorship: You be the Judge

Google Ad-sense sent an automated notice that their machines were going to stop serving ads because I listed the sites that we often search for telephone numbers as explained above.  Of course machines can’t read, but they can find links. Now Google is censoring content because they don’t like to place ads on anything that has links to sites that they don’t like, in this case so-called ‘adult content’.  I can understand not wanting to be involved in promoting pornography or the sex trade, but this is only a machine telling me what to write and there is nobody to talk to and no living person at Google ever read this article.

The Google Wonder Wheel Is Gone;

Google Squared and News Timeline disappear;

and the removal of the Google News Archive search page are a mystery.

CarFax is owned by CarMax, while AutoCheck is owned by the large U.S.credit reporting agency, Experian.  AutoCheck is not to confused with Auto Check™ which is an online database containing information about accident damaged, insurance “total loss” branded and stolen vehicles that was developed in 1995 by the Used Car Dealers Association of Ontario, for the exclusive use of its members.

AutoCheck purchases the data from the auto auctions and CarFax does not. As a result of this, CarFax often fails to report previous accidents and things like frame damage.  Autocheck is the de facto standard at the auto auctions.

In Canada Carproof is by far the better system, as they have more access to insurance data, repair shop estimates, lien history, police and ministry of Transportation data, and more.

An Investigator armed with a vehicle’s VIN, and who is willing to pay the fees, just might find out about an undisclosed vehicle accident using one of these services.