If you are filing a Canadian trademark application, or you have just opened a letter from CIPO with the words Examiner's Report at the top, it helps to know how common that letter actually is. The term sounds like a rejection. In Canadian practice it is usually a routine step. This post starts from the public record rather than reassurance alone. CIPO publishes the complete record of Canadian trademark applications and registrations as open data, and Clearview maintains a research database built from it, covering the prosecution history of more than two million applications. That record shows how often applications draw an examiner's report and how long the first one takes to arrive.
One naming note before the numbers. Applicants influenced by United States practice often search for a trademark office action. The document itself is called an Examiner's Report in Canada, and the first one on a file is recorded as the Examiner's First Report. CIPO does use "first office action" as an umbrella term in its published performance targets, where it covers either an approval or an Examiner's Report.
What is an Examiner's Report?
An Examiner's Report is written correspondence from a CIPO examiner setting out issues that need to be addressed before an application can move toward approval. It is not a final refusal. It is the examiner's list of objections or requirements, and the applicant has a chance to answer. CIPO generally allows six months to respond, and an application can keep moving if the response answers the objections, amends the application where the rules allow, or provides evidence that addresses the examiner's concerns. Clearview's explainer on what an Examiner's Report covers walks through the document in more detail.
How often does an application get an Examiner's Report?
Often enough that receiving one puts you in the majority. Look at applications filed in 2021, a cohort old enough that almost all of them have now been examined. Of the 84,973 applications filed that year, 52,826 have an Examiner's First Report on record, which is 62.2% as of the July 2026 data snapshot.
A mature filing year matters here. Applications filed in 2025 or 2026 are still working through the queue, and many have not reached examination yet, so the share of recent filings with a report on record would understate how common reports really are. The 2021 cohort avoids that problem because the examination stage is largely behind it. Reading the rate off a recent, unfinished year would be misleading, which is why the percentage here comes from a settled cohort rather than the latest filings.
How long until the first report arrives?
For the 2021 cohort, the median wait from filing to the Examiner's First Report was 680 days, a little under two years. That is a filing-cohort measure. It follows a group of applications filed in the same year and asks how long their first reports took.
There is a second, more current way to look at the wait, and the two are easy to confuse. Clearview's Canadian trademark timeline analysis measures the reports issued in a given calendar period rather than a filing cohort, and on that basis the median wait fell from 519 days for first reports issued in 2025 to 307 days in the first half of 2026. Those event-year figures describe the files reaching examination now, which is why they look faster than the 2021 cohort. Both numbers are correct. They answer slightly different questions, one about a fixed group of applications and one about recent output.
How many reports does CIPO issue each year?
The annual volume of Examiner's First Reports has risen sharply. The table below counts first reports by the calendar year in which CIPO issued them, which is the office's output rather than any single filing cohort.
| Calendar year | Examiner's First Reports issued |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 32,692 |
| 2022 | 39,226 |
| 2023 | 39,741 |
| 2024 | 88,189 |
| 2025 | 79,499 |
The jump in 2024 is real and worth explaining, because a figure that more than doubles in a year can look like an error. It is not. It reflects CIPO working down a long backlog of applications waiting for first examination. Facing a queue that had left many applicants waiting years for a first report, the office expanded its examiner ranks and pushed examination to record output through 2024, and it introduced new service standards, effective January 1, 2024, committing to a first action within 18 months on applications that use its pre-approved list of goods and services. CIPO's published monthly production statistics track that effort and the shrinking inventory of unexamined files. The slight easing to 79,499 in 2025 still sits well above the pre-2024 pace, and the trend continued into 2026, with 29,379 first reports issued from January through the July snapshot. The clearest sign of the effort is in the wait itself, which as noted above has fallen for the files reaching examination most recently.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure in this post is Clearview's calculation from CIPO's published records, not a statistic published by CIPO. Reports are counted from the Examiner's First Report entries in the prosecution history, and each wait is measured in days from the application's filing date. As a check on the pipeline, register-wide totals from the database were reconciled against CIPO's published annual trademark statistics, and registrations issued line up within a fraction of a percent for the two most recent fiscal years. Clearview keeps the current figures on its Canadian Trademark Data page, updated monthly, and freezes each post like this one at its snapshot date.
What can an Examiner's Report raise?
Reports vary. The dataset records that a first report was issued, not what it said, so the list below describes the subjects a CIPO examiner assesses rather than a classification of these particular files. A report can raise:
- goods and services that need clearer or more precise wording
- the Nice classification of the goods and services
- confusion with a trademark already on the register
- a mark that is considered primarily descriptive
- a lack of inherent distinctiveness
- a mark that is primarily a surname or a geographic name
- formalities and application requirements
- translations or transliterations of non-English or non-French wording
- colour claims or the description of a design
A report can raise one of these or several at once, and the substance ranges from a quick wording fix to a serious objection that decides whether the mark can register at all. That is why the count of reports, on its own, does not measure how many applications hit a real problem. Clearview's guide to examination risks beyond confusion covers the objections that catch applicants off guard.
Why represented applications still received reports
One finding cuts against the intuition that hiring help means avoiding objections. In the 2015 to 2022 filing cohorts, applications with a representative on record were more likely to receive an Examiner's First Report, not less. Represented applications carried a first report on record 68.9% of the time, compared with 58.6% for unrepresented ones.
Represented applications drew more reports, yet they ended in registration far more often, at 76.3% versus 47.6%, and in abandonment far less often, at 20.1% versus 50.0%, as of the same July 2026 snapshot. The reports were not what separated the two groups. Clearview's analysis of representation and registration outcomes looks at that gap in detail.
The data does not say why the pattern holds, and it is an association rather than proof of cause. Several explanations are plausible.
- Represented files may include more complex or commercially important marks that were always more likely to draw a report.
- Represented applicants may be more likely to answer a report and keep the application alive rather than let it lapse.
- A representative is sometimes appointed only after a report arrives, which links representation to files that were already contested.
- The representative field reflects the current state of the record, not necessarily who prepared the application when it was filed.
What the numbers support is narrow but useful. A report is common, and receiving one is not what separates the applications that register from the ones that do not.
What to do if you receive one
If an Examiner's Report has arrived, the response matters more than the report itself. Preparing one generally involves:
- Reading the report closely and identifying every objection or requirement it raises.
- Recording the deadline, which CIPO generally sets at six months from the report date.
- Working out, for each issue, whether an amendment, an argument, supporting evidence, or a narrowing of the goods and services is available.
- Assessing how any narrowing would affect the commercial coverage the brand actually needs.
- Weighing that coverage against the speed of clearing an objection, because goods or services given up can be hard to recover later.
A strong response often does more than clear the objection. It protects the scope of the registration you end up with. Clearview's note on why professional help matters for objections explains where a considered response changes the outcome.
The takeaway
An Examiner's Report is a common, manageable step in Canadian trademark prosecution, not a verdict. In the 2021 filing cohort most applications drew one, the wait for it has been getting shorter as CIPO clears its backlog, and receiving a report is not what separates the applications that register from the ones that do not. If you are weighing whether to file, a clearance search can identify confusion risks before an application goes in, and precise goods and services wording, particularly terms drawn from CIPO's pre-approved list, can keep some specification objections from arising at all. The full process is set out in Clearview's guide to registering a trademark in Canada.
If a CIPO Examiner's Report has landed on your file, Clearview can review it and help assess the response options before the deadline. Clearview offers fixed-fee trademark registration packages starting at $999 plus applicable taxes, prepared and filed by a lawyer who is also a registered trademark agent. Contact Clearview to talk through a report or an application.