Digital Marketing for Canadian Businesses

CASL is opt-in, and you have to prove it

Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation is the strictest commercial messaging regime among the markets we work in, and the difference from an opt-out regime is structural rather than incremental. Before sending a commercial electronic message you need consent, either express — given knowingly, for a clearly stated purpose, with the sender identified — or implied, which arises only from specific relationships defined in the legislation and expires. An existing business relationship based on a purchase generally supports implied consent for a period after it, and an inquiry supports a shorter one. Those clocks run whether or not anyone is watching them.

The provision that reshapes practice is that the burden of proving consent sits with the sender. It is not enough to believe a contact opted in; you have to be able to demonstrate when, how and to what. That turns consent into a data structure — timestamp, source, wording shown, IP or channel, and the scope of what was agreed — stored in a way you can retrieve years later. Most CRM setups we inherit cannot produce this, which means the practical answer to whether the list is compliant is that nobody knows.

Two consequences follow immediately. Purchased and scraped lists are unusable in Canada, and any agency offering you one is offering you a liability with penalties attached that reach into the millions for organisations. And the pre-checked box, the assumed consent from a business card and the "we assumed you would want to hear from us" reactivation email are all outside the regime rather than at its edges. We build lists that grow more slowly and can be defended, keep the consent record with the contact, and set the implied-consent expiries as real dates in the system rather than as something to remember.

Advertising claims, drip pricing and what has to be tested first

The Competition Act governs representations to the public, and several provisions bear directly on digital advertising in ways that have become more consequential recently. The general prohibition on materially false or misleading representations covers ad copy, landing pages, social posts and influencer content alike. Beyond that, performance claims about a product require adequate and proper testing to have been conducted before the claim is made — not evidence assembled afterwards if challenged, but testing that existed first.

Drip pricing is now explicitly addressed: presenting a price that is not attainable because mandatory fixed charges are added later is reviewable conduct. That reaches a lot of standard e-commerce and service marketing practice — an advertised rate that becomes something else once compulsory fees appear at checkout, or a headline price excluding a mandatory charge disclosed only in the final step. The safe position is that the advertised price should be the price a customer can actually pay, excluding only genuine sales tax.

Two more areas deserve care. Ordinary selling price rules constrain "was/now" and discount claims — the reference price has to reflect a genuine selling history or volume, so a permanent sale that has never had a real regular price is a problem. And environmental claims now carry explicit substantiation expectations, so "eco-friendly", "carbon neutral" or "sustainable" in a Canadian campaign need methodology behind them. We flag claims during campaign build, ask what evidence exists, and narrow the claim to what can be supported. That is a slower content process and it usually produces better copy, because a specific substantiated claim outperforms a vague superlative anyway.

Tracking consent and measurement that survives it

Law 25 addresses technologies that collect personal information: an organisation using them has to inform people and offer the means to deactivate them. In practice that has pushed Quebec toward a genuine consent standard for tracking, closer to European practice than to the passive banner common elsewhere in North America. For a business marketing across Canada that usually means implementing to the stricter standard nationally, because operating two measurement configurations by province is more fragile than simply doing it properly.

The consequence for marketing is that a share of your traffic will not be tracked, and this has to be planned for rather than discovered when the numbers drop. Attribution gets blurrier, retargeting audiences get smaller, and view-through conversion numbers become optimistic. The correct response is not to look for a way around the consent, which is both a compliance and a reputational risk, but to lean on measurement that does not depend on individual-level tracking — server-side conversion recording where consent supports it, holdout tests, correlation between spend and outcome at the channel level, and asking customers where they heard about you.

The honest framing we give clients is that the tracked number was never as precise as it looked. Cross-device journeys, blocked scripts and last-click attribution were already producing a distorted picture, and the discipline that consent requirements force — measuring outcomes rather than proxies, running deliberate tests instead of reading dashboards — tends to improve decision quality. What we will not do is promise attribution certainty we cannot deliver, or implement tracking designed to circumvent a choice the user made.

Questions worth asking any vendor

These apply to us as much as to anyone else bidding for your work.

• Ask how consent is recorded for every contact on your list. If the system cannot show when and how it was given, the burden of proof under CASL is not one you can meet.
• Ask whether anyone has offered you a purchased list. In Canada that is a liability with penalties attached, and the offer tells you what kind of agency you are speaking to.
• Try unsubscribing from your own emails. If it requires a login, a reply or several steps, it is unlikely to meet the readily-performed standard.
• Ask which claims in your current advertising have testing behind them, and whether the advertised price is the price a customer can actually pay.
• Ask whether the French campaigns are written or translated, and whether they are budgeted and reported separately. Blended reporting hides whichever market is failing.