Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation: Compliance and Enforcement Update From the Regulators

On November 20, 2018, the Ontario Bar Association presented “Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL): A Joint Presentation on Compliance and Enforcement” and welcomed speakers from all three CASL enforcement agencies: Steven Harroun, chief compliance and enforcement officer, Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC); Brent R. Homan, deputy commissioner, compliance, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC); and Russel Jutlah, assistant deputy commissioner, Competition Bureau. What follows is a summary of the key points made during the presentation.

The CRTC reported that since July 1, 2014, there have been approximately 1.4 million complaints made by individual Canadians to the Spam Reporting Centre, with the majority of complaints relating primarily to lack of consent to send messages and, secondly, instances of deficient identification information. For its part, the OPC, which also has an enforcement role, received 52 CASL-related requests to its Information Centre and nine written complaints between 2017 and 2018.