By: Andrew Laing
Canada has recently enacted new anti-spam legislation, unimaginatively known as Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation, or CASL (you have to give our Congress some credit for coming up with CAN-SPAM). The central achievement of the legislation is a tough opt-in regime for most commercial electronic communications: the law imposes a variety of new requirements Canadian businesses will have to meet regarding consent (which cannot be sought through purely electronic means), disclosure of information, and unsubscription procedures.
This news dovetails nicely with our discussion of existing and proposed European and American laws governing electronic communications, and it also intersects with our recent consideration of “commercial speech” as a distinct category of expression. Some opponents of CASL argue (as in the Financial Post article linked below) that the law makes it needlessly difficult for businesses to reach out to and inform consumers and that overzealous enforcement might cause the law to reach beyond what we usually think of as “spam” to encompass more innocuous interpersonal e-mails that discuss commercial transactions. This raises a deeper question: to what extent is it desirable (or even permissible, under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms) to raise high barriers to electronic commercial expression in the name of consumer protection? It’s worth keeping that question in mind as Canada’s CASL debate evolves in the coming years.
Here is a Canadian government website explaining CASL:
Here are links to two opinion pieces expressing opposing viewpoints on CASL:
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/02/28/delete-this-anti-spam-law/
Finally, here is an overview of Canada’s approach to freedom of commercial expression (see section B(2)(b)):
http://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/CIR/8416-e.htm