How to Access Court Records in Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut

Online court records access varies sharply across Canada's three territories: Northwest Territories and Nunavut both run public docket-search tools usable without registration, while Yukon's equivalent tool sits behind a login screen whose scope could not be confirmed from outside it.

Information last verified on 2026-08-15. This article has not yet been reviewed by a licensed lawyer.

Yukon

Court Structure

Yukon runs four levels: the Court of Appeal of Yukon, hearing appeals from the Supreme Court; the Supreme Court of Yukon, the superior trial court for civil, criminal, and family matters, which also maintains a Deputy Judges roster; the Territorial Court of Yukon, the provincial-court equivalent handling criminal and family matters and small-claims oversight, which also runs a Domestic Violence Treatment Option Court, a Community Wellness Court, and a dedicated Youth Justice Court of Yukon; and a separate Small Claims Court with its own rules, forms, and fee structure.

Online Case and Docket Search

The Yukon Courts homepage displays a prominent button labeled "Yukon Courts login," linking to an authenticated docket-retrieval tool on a separate subdomain. The button's wording and the tool's URL slug both point to a login-gated system rather than an open public search, but that subdomain could not be reached to confirm who is permitted to log in, such as parties, lawyers, or the public with account creation, what results it returns, or whether there is a fee. The correct, careful statement is that Yukon operates an online docket-retrieval tool gated behind a login with an unconfirmed scope, not that Yukon has open public online case search and not that Yukon has no online tool at all.

What is genuinely available without any login is narrower than a case-status search. A Supreme Court Dockets page publishes rolling PDF hearing lists, essentially a forward-looking calendar of what is being heard and when, not a tool for looking up a specific person's case status. The Territorial Court and Court of Appeal publish comparable calendar-style docket PDFs. Separately, each court level publishes its own judgments database of written reasons for judgment and sentencing; the Supreme Court's own page states it contains most reasons since January 2006, with decisions from 2001 onward being added as resources allow, and that certain decisions subject to a publication ban or privacy concern are withheld from the site. That is a decisions archive, useful for reading a court's past rulings, not a way to check whether someone has an open or pending case.

Registry Access, Fees, and Restrictions

The Yukon Court of Appeal has a formal, dated written access policy, its "File and Proceeding Access Guideline," last approved December 9, 2025. No equivalent published guideline was confirmed for the Supreme Court or Territorial Court, which is a gap in what is publicly documented rather than a confirmed absence of any policy at those levels.

Under the Court of Appeal's guideline: civil documents such as Notices of Appeal, Reasons for Judgment, Orders, and Clerk's Notes are accessible by registry inquiry in Whitehorse, while factums, appeal records, appeal books, and transcripts require a written request to the Registrar. Criminal files follow the same pattern except that bail orders always require a written Registrar request, never a simple counter inquiry. Family file access is the most restricted category: limited to parties, a party's lawyer, or an authorized agent, with everyone else required to apply to a Justice in chambers for an access order. Audio recordings are available to anyone entitled to be in the courtroom, except for oral reasons for judgment, which are withheld because they are subject to editing before becoming the official transcript. Transcripts are ordered through a private stenography service via a form on the territorial government's court-services page. Court of Appeal proceedings are webcast contemporaneously on Zoom, with the link posted a week ahead, except for chambers matters, Youth Criminal Justice Act prosecution appeals, matters under a publication ban or sealing order, or where the court finds broadcast incompatible with privacy; recording, re-broadcasting, photographing, or screenshotting any hearing or webcast is prohibited outright, and Zoom links may not be re-shared or embedded elsewhere.

Supreme Court fees relevant to records access, from the court's own published fee schedule: a search of a record costs $4, except a search by a party or their own lawyer of their own proceeding, which is not charged this fee; copies cost $0.50 per page; a certified copy of a document of record costs $15 for the first 10 pages plus $3 per additional page; a certificate of judgment or certificate of pending litigation each cost $15; and registry fax service costs $7.50 flat plus $0.50 per page. The court may waive fees entirely for a person found indigent on application, unless the underlying claim or defence is groundless, frivolous, or an abuse of process. A separate Small Claims Court fee schedule for records access specifically was not located.

Northwest Territories

Court Structure

Northwest Territories runs the Court of Appeal, governed by the Judicature Act; the Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories, a superior court with its own Rules of Court, Divorce Rules, Estate Administration Rules, and Criminal Procedure Rules; the Territorial Court, which includes a Civil Claims division functioning as the small-claims equivalent alongside its criminal division, and runs specialized dockets including an Intimate Partner Violence Treatment Options Court, a Wellness Court, and a Youth Justice Court; and a separate Justice of the Peace Court tier handling its own Traffic and Bail dockets.

Online Case and Docket Search

Northwest Territories runs the most openly documented public search tool of the three territories, at nwtcourts.ca's schedule page, verified live with real current data. It has two components:

• Scheduled matters: filterable by court (Justice of the Peace Court – Traffic, JP Court – Bail, Territorial Court – Civil, Territorial Court – Criminal, Supreme Court – Civil, Supreme Court – Criminal, or Court of Appeal), by location across every NWT community courthouse, and by a start and end date, returning the matching docket.
• Today's court appearances: lists, by party name, everyone appearing in court that calendar day, along with location and time. The page states plainly, "Restricted parties (e.g. youths) are not shown," a real access restriction built directly into the tool itself rather than left to a policy note.

Downloadable docket PDFs are also offered, and the schedule page states that access to some dockets is restricted for privacy reasons and requires a password; which specific dockets require one was not itemized. This tool covers scheduled and current matters, not a full case-history or party-name-across-time search: it will not pull up a person's litigation history or a closed case file, only what is currently or imminently on a court calendar.

A separate decisions database, hosted on a Lexum "Decisia" platform, publishes NWT written judgments and was confirmed live and recently updated. This is a decisions archive, distinct from the schedule/appearances search above and from the registry-based file access described next.

Registry Access, Fees, and Transcripts

Court registries are open to the public and keep all files related to court proceedings; the territorial government's own registries page states that searches of court files and judgments may be made at a court registry, subject to some files being restricted by statute or order, and that a fee may apply. Three physical registries operate: Yellowknife (the main registry, 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.), Hay River, and Inuvik (both 9:30 a.m. to noon and 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.), with communities lacking a local registry directed to call the nearest one toll-free. Staff can explain procedural matters but cannot give legal advice.

Fees, under the Court Services Fees Regulations: a search of the Clerk's records costs $11, confirmed identically and independently across three separate fee schedules covering the Supreme Court, the Territorial Court, and the Sheriff's office, so this is not a coincidence of one schedule but a consistent figure across the system. Photocopying a filed document costs $1 per page in each of those schedules as well. A certified or sealed copy after the first costs $15, and commencing a Supreme Court action costs $165. Court transcripts cost $2 per page, plus $1 per page for urgent requests, ordered through a Transcript Request form addressed to the Transcript Coordinator in the Department of Justice's Court Services division, payable in person at a registry or by a pre-authorized credit card form.

Restrictions

Beyond the appearances tool's built-in suppression of restricted parties such as youths, the Court Registries page notes generally that some files are restricted by statute or order without itemizing which. No separate, itemized written access-restriction guideline comparable to Yukon's Court of Appeal policy was found for Northwest Territories, and no family-law-specific restriction rule equivalent to Yukon's parties-and-lawyers-only family rule was located either; whether NWT applies an equivalent practice in family matters was not confirmed.

Nunavut

Court Structure

Nunavut's court system is structured differently from Yukon's and NWT's. The Nunavut Court of Justice, established April 1, 1999 with the consent of Canada, the Interim Commissioner of Nunavut, and Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., is Canada's only unified single-level trial court: it functions simultaneously as the superior court and as the provincial or territorial-court equivalent, with no separate Supreme Court and Territorial Court as in Yukon or NWT. Before 1999, Nunavut's territory was served by the Territorial Court of the Northwest Territories and the Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories. Above it sits the Nunavut Court of Appeal, which sits only two or three times a year, drawing judges from the Nunavut Court of Justice and from the courts of Alberta, Northwest Territories, and Yukon; indictable-offence appeals go to a panel, summary-conviction appeals to a single judge. A separate Nunavut Justice of the Peace Court and a dedicated Nunavut Youth Justice Court round out the structure, the latter named specifically in the territory's own access-to-records policy alongside the Court of Justice.

Online Case and Docket Search

Nunavut runs the broadest online search of the three territories, at dockets.nunavutcourts.ca, a dedicated search application offering four distinct search modes, none of which required a login to reach the search form itself: a Name / Court File Search, searching by party or counsel name, court file number, police file number, or date range, filterable by criminal or civil court type, stating explicitly that a maximum of 5,000 records will be returned and that names are searched from both parties and counsel; a Docket Search by community (all 25 Nunavut communities are listed individually), court type, and date range; a Concluded Docket Search, covering matters that have already concluded; and a Daily Court Dockets view scoped to Iqaluit by courtroom and morning or afternoon session. The site's own About page adds a currency caveat worth carrying forward to readers: "Information provided are as on current date and does not reflect the latest changes."

A genuine access note for readers, not a security warning about the content itself: dockets.nunavutcourts.ca only works over the unencrypted http:// address. The https:// version of the site fails to load at all due to a certificate or connection problem on that host. If your browser blocks or warns you off the plain http:// link, that is a known issue with how the site's connection is set up, not necessarily a sign the page itself is unsafe, but you should still avoid entering any more information into the search than the tool actually asks for, and should not assume the connection is private the way an https:// page normally would be.

Access to Court Records Policy

Nunavut has the most detailed, dated written access policy of the three territories, effective September 28, 2021, covering the Nunavut Court of Justice, the Youth Justice Court of Nunavut, and the Justice of the Peace Court by its own stated scope. Notably, the Court of Appeal is not named within that scope section, so whether it has its own separate policy is unconfirmed.

The policy states the open-court principle directly: "Members of the public have a presumptive right of Access to all Court Records with the exception of Protected Case File Documents and Restricted Case Files. Even where a Case File is sealed, members of the public have a right to know that a Case File exists." Restrictions may only be imposed where no reasonable alternative exists to protect the interest at stake and the harm from full access outweighs the benefit of openness, and the burden of justifying any restriction falls on whoever wants to limit access.

Some information is available at any time, in person or by phone from the Registry, subject to any active non-publication order. For an adult criminal case, once past first appearance, that includes the accused's name, age, the alleged offence date, the charges, disposition, plea, the presiding judge, and Crown and defence counsel names. For a youth criminal case at the same stage, it includes confirmation the matter is governed by the Youth Criminal Justice Act, the offence date, charges, disposition, plea, judge, and counsel, but notably not the young person's name. For civil cases, it includes party names, hearing date and location, disposition, judge, and counsel.

Several specific access limits stand out as more detailed than what was found for Yukon or NWT: once a convicted person becomes merely eligible for a record suspension, not once one is actually granted, the case file becomes accessible only on application to a judge, a notably earlier and stricter cutoff than the eligible-versus-granted distinction that governs the separate, federal CPIC record-check system. Completed civil and family case files that have been closed for 15 years or more require judge approval to access, an aging-archive restriction not found described elsewhere in this territory group. Pre-trial, settlement-conference, and mediation materials stay outside the public file unless a judge later formally makes them part of it, and internal correspondence between the court, parties, staff, judiciary, and counsel stays non-public unless entered as an exhibit.

Fees

Nunavut has a formal legislated fee structure for court records under a specific regulation made under the Judicature Act, but its exact dollar figures for a search, a copy, or a certified copy could not be verified. The only copy located is an image-only scanned PDF with no extractable text layer, confirmed unreadable two independent ways, and the alternate legislation-hosting site that lists the same regulation could not be reached either. Do not assume Nunavut's search fee matches Yukon's $4 or NWT's $11; it could be higher or lower in either direction, and a specific figure should not be quoted without confirming it directly with the Registry.

Registry and Restrictions

Nunavut's court registry is physically based at the Nunavut Justice Centre in Iqaluit, split into a Criminal Registry and a Civil Registry with separate contacts. Because the Nunavut Court of Justice is a circuit court, clerks travel with it to communities throughout the territory, bringing a traveling registry along; registry staff can answer procedural questions but cannot give legal advice. A separate, dated policy stack, in force since April 1, 2013, governs media accreditation and the use of recording technology in Nunavut courtrooms and courthouses specifically, distinct from the records-access policy described above: it covers whether and how a device can be used in the room, not whether a record can be accessed.

Youth Records and the Open-Court Principle

Across all three territories, records connected to a young person facing a criminal charge are governed by the federal Youth Criminal Justice Act, which restricts identifying a young person and limits access to youth records to specified people. That federal restriction shows up differently in each territory's own tools: NWT's appearances list omits restricted parties, including youths, by design; Nunavut's access policy withholds a young person's name even from the otherwise-available phone information; and Yukon excludes Youth Criminal Justice Act prosecution appeals from Court of Appeal webcasts specifically.

The broader open-court principle behind all of this, balancing public access against privacy and the administration of justice, comes from the same national line of Supreme Court of Canada cases that governs court access everywhere in Canada; see the Canada court records hub for the fuller explanation of that doctrine. Being able to find a record never makes it lawful to publish what it contains; a publication ban restricts what can be shared regardless of how the underlying record was obtained, and breaching one is itself an offence.

Court Records Are Not a Criminal Record Check

Searching a territorial court docket or file is different from getting a police criminal record check. The tools described above look up what happened, or is happening, in a specific court case, while a criminal record check pulls from the national, RCMP-maintained database that employers, volunteer organizations, and border agencies typically request. For that process, see criminal record checks in Canada and background checks and employment in Canada. If someone has since become eligible for or received a record suspension, see record suspensions and pardons in Canada; as Nunavut's own policy shows, eligibility and an actual grant can trigger different access rules even within a single court system. None of this article's information should be used as an informal tenant or employment screen.

For how to start a civil claim generally, see how to file a small claim in Canada. For birth, death, and marriage certificates across Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut, a related but separate government record, see vital records in the territories.

Disclaimer

This article is informational only and is not legal advice. Court access policies, online tools, and fees in Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut can change. Yukon's login-gated docket tool and Nunavut's exact court-records fee figures could not be independently verified and are described here as unconfirmed rather than assumed. Nunavut's docket search site currently works only over an unencrypted http:// connection. A publication ban restricts what can be shared even where a record can be viewed; breaching one is an offence. For a specific matter, confirm current procedures, fees, and restrictions directly with the relevant territorial court registry.