Transport Canada maintains a public database of every vehicle recall issued in Canada since 1975 — 17,918 of them, most recently updated 6 August 2026. You do not need a VIN, an account, or a subscription to search it.
The quickest route
Enter your year, make and model. That returns every recall Transport Canada has issued for that vehicle, with what is wrong and what the dealer is required to do about it. If you have your VIN handy, paste it and we will usually fill in all three. The VIN itself does not encode the model — positions 4–8 are manufacturer-defined and nothing portable reads a model name out of them — so we look it up against the patterns manufacturers file with NHTSA. When that lookup is unavailable, or returns a model we hold no recalls for, you pick the model yourself and we say so rather than guessing.
Why the repair is almost always free
Transport Canada’s own wording is that a manufacturer “will almost always make these repairs free of charge”. Not quite the absolute guarantee it is usually described as — but close enough that being asked to pay for recall work is unusual and worth questioning. Since 2018 the Minister of Transport has been able to order a company to pay for repairs so owners do not bear the cost. People ignore recall letters because they assume a bill is coming; almost always, there is not one.
The limits of a make/model/year check
A recall usually applies to a production range rather than every example of a model year. Searching by make, model and year tells you what was issued for that vehicle; only a dealer checking your VIN can confirm what is outstanding on your car. That check is free and takes a phone call.
What “superseded” means
Transport Canada marks some campaigns as superseded, meaning a later recall replaced them. Those are shown separately here rather than mixed in — turning up at a dealer asking for a withdrawn repair wastes everyone’s time.
The problem with waiting for a letter
Recall notices go to the registered owner on file with the manufacturer. If you bought privately, moved, or the registration was never updated, the letter goes somewhere else. That is the gap this site exists to close: save your vehicle and you get an email the day a new recall is issued for it, regardless of what the manufacturer’s records say.