How many transactions are you doing a year? Canadian stock trades can be done with pretty much all brokerages in Canada for under $10 a trade. Some brokers such as Questtrade even have zero transaction fees for ETFs, which matters if you're making frequent transactions. Full service brokers/advisors such as Edward Jones tend to charge higher fees for each stock transaction. Edward Jones may not charge for transactions involving mutual funds, but they will receive trailer fees (essentially sales commissions) which will cut into your returns, on top of the MER fees (typically 1.5 to 2.5% for Canadian mutual funds, and often 1.0% or less for ETFs).
I'm firmly of the view that Edward Jones advisors are never worth it, but I've been investing on my own for sometime now. Buy and hold is the way to go - don't ever get into daytrading - the transaction fees will kill you and it will become a time-consuming full-time job leaving you with little/no time for anything else.
As for my own portfolio, I have many dividend payers that I've held and will continue to hold for the long term. Most are concentrated in telecom (T, BCE, RCI.B), financials (all of the big six banks) and REITs (mostly residential and industrial).
Online brokers have come a long way over the past 5-10 years in terms of the information they provide. I use TD and HSBC for my investment accounts and you can see the purchase price (book value) and dividend payments (under activity or cash history) quite easily. Most companies post the dividend histories on their website, e.g.
https://www.telus.com/en/about/inves...nd-information or
https://granitereit.com/investors/distributions/