Legislative Let-Down? CRTC Issues Proposed Anti-Spam Regulations

Much-anticipated new anti-spam regulations will provide some clarity for senders of text messages, but may disappoint others, as the regulations leave unanswered many other questions of interpretation and application of the new statute.

The proposed Electronic Commerce Protection Regulations, released for public comment by the CRTC, do provide some further detail to the basic requirements under Canada's ponderously named new anti-spam legislation, (which for convenience is coming to be known unofficially as Canada's Anti-Spam Law (CASL)); however, the details are largely what one could infer from the statute.

Information to be included in messages

As we have previously noted, the statute includes a requirement that commercial electronic messages be in a specified form, including the identity and contact information of the sender of a message and the person on whose behalf the message is sent and a clear unsubscribe mechanism. The Regulations amplify somewhat