Overview of the BBB in Canada

The Better Business Bureau first started in the United States in 1912 and in Canada in 1935. Today there are over 170 bureau and branch offices in Canada and The United States with the international headquarters located at the Council of Better Business Bureaus Inc. in Arlington, Virginia.

The Canadian Council of Better Business Bureaus (CCBBB), established in June of 1966, is the coordinating and licensing body of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) system in Canada. The BBB is a not-for-profit, public service organization financed by the private business sector with local Bureaus serving communities and marketplaces across Canada.

Good business starts with trust.  Without that trust the relationship between buyer and seller is undermined and over time the marketplace and our economy suffers.  Forward thinking business leaders have always understood this and for 75 years they have helped create and support Better Business Bureaus in Canada to define and promote the standards of excellence that set the best businesses apart from the rest.

The BBB promotes trust in the marketplace in several important ways.  It collects complaint histories and other information about businesses and provides consumers with unbiased reliability reports to better enable them in their purchasing decisions. 

The BBB also evaluates businesses against objective standards, permitting only those businesses that meet and uphold those standards to join in supporting the BBB mission.  

When disputes arise, as they can in even the best of business relationships, the BBB offers impartial dispute resolution services to solve problems fast and fairly in a way that helps to preserve a healthy relationship between a business and its customer.

In 2005 Canadian BBBs provided consumers with over 2.3 million company Reliability Reports and helped resolve over 14,000 complaints.  The Better Business Bureau is unique because of its position of neutrality and its outstanding history of service.  

As with any success story, there are imitators, but none have the stringent operating and objective evaluation standards of the BBB and none that have a comparable history or reputation for integrity and reliable information.

Our Vision:

An ethical marketplace where buyers and sellers can trust each other.

Our Mission:

To be the leader in advancing marketplace trust.

We do this by:

• Creating a community of trustworthy businesses
• Setting standards for marketplace trust
• Encouraging and supporting best practices
• Celebrating marketplace role models
• Denouncing substandard marketplace behavior

Our Values

To accomplish our mission, we commit to the following values to guide all of our decisions and behavior, with each other and with all those we serve:

Excellence:

Strive to do our very best.  Be accountable to the general public, our members, and to each other for everything we do.  Commit to providing the highest quality service with excellence and consistency everywhere we operate.

Integrity:

Be honest and ethical in all of our business activities.  Treat everyone with integrity, keeping our promises and learning from our mistakes.  Have the courage to hold fast to our professional convictions.

Teamwork:

Communicate, cooperate and collaborate freely across organizational and territorial boundaries, and work as on team to fulfill our mission.

Trust:

Trust in our colleagues throughout the Bureau system and in ourselves.  Say what we mean and mean what we say.  Communicate with honesty and candor.

Respect:

Treat everyone with respect and dignity, valuing individual and cultural differences.  People are our fundamental asset.  We will empower them to develop and use their talents and capabilities to the fullest.