The tool you should explore is Financial Performance Data. It allows you to build custom reports to illustrate the financial health of Canadian companies in a given industry. In order to use this tool, however, you will need to know the NAICS code for the industry you're researching. If you do not know this, refer to the following page on finding industry codes.
The reports generated contain information on the industry as a whole, upper and lower quartiles, financial ratios, percentage of businesses that are profitable, and more. And, all of the data provided in your custom-built report can be downloaded to Excel, so that you can further crunch the numbers. How awesome is that?!
Screenshot of a custom-build report:
There are a couple more resources for finding ratios, too, available through Statistics Canada.
Note that you can customize results by clicking on the 'Add/Remove Data' tab and you can view all the possible values in a category by clicking on the 'Expand' link on the right side of the search page. The two options are:
In Mergent Online, you can find financials and ratios for publicly traded companies and you can create comparison reports of financials and ratios for competing companies.
To find financials and ratios on a single company, enter the company's name on the left of Mergent's home screen:
Creating custom comparison reports of competing companies requires more steps. For guidance on that:
If you have any questions, follow up with a Royal Roads Librarian