What Does Canada’s New Anti-Spam Legislation Mean for your Organization?

The Canadian Government has introduced a new Anti-Spam Legislation. This Act takes effect on July 1, 2014 and applies to Canadian organizations or individuals sending commercially electronic messages to other Canadian organizations or individuals. If you fall into one or both of these categories, here’s what you need to know:

What does Canada’s new Anti-Spam Legislation mean for your organization?

Basically, the Act has been instated to help protect consumers and organizations from “spam and related threats to electronic commerce“. This means that all Commercial Electronic Messages (CEM) sent from your organization need to comply with this new Act, by including the following three criteria:

Consent

“You must have expressed or implied consent to send a message.” This consent can be written, verbal or in the form of an opt-in subscription.

Identification

“You must clearly and simply identify yourselves and anyone else on whose behalf the message is sent.”

Unsubscribe option (opt-out)

“In every message you send, you must provide a way for recipients to unsubscribe from receiving messages in the future.”

What is a Commercial Electronic Message (CEM)?

A CEM is an electronically sent message with the purpose to encourage the recipient to participate in commercial activity. For example:

• “Offers to purchase, sell, barter or lease a product, goods, a service, land or an interest or right in land;
• Offers to provide a business, investment or gaming opportunity;
• Promoting a person, including the public image of a person, as being a person who does anything referred to above, or who intends to do so.”

Penalties for violating this Act

“If you commit a violation under any of sections 6 to 9 of CASL, then you may be required to pay an administrative monetary penalty (AMP). The maximum amount of an AMP, per violation, for an individual is $1 million, and for a business, it is $10 million. CASL sets out a list of factors considered in the determination the amount of the AMP.

Takeaways

For individuals and organizations that have always followed best-practices when it comes to sending CEMs (which means that you have express or implied consent from each of your recipients), you have nothing to worry about. But for those Canadians and Canadian organizations that add people to an email list without their express consent (receiving a business card from someone at a networking event does not count as consent), or that engages in mass emailing or direct marketing campaigns online, you’ll need to revise and change your strategies and tactics.

For more information about this new Act, feel free to follow the below links (which I also used as references and the quotes included within this post):

• Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation
• Government of Canada
• Canada’s Anti-Spam Law: Key exemptions