Today the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development announced that Private Right of Action (PRA) provisions of Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) would not be coming into force as scheduled on July 1, 2017.

The full announcement can be found on the Government of Canada’s website and Privy Council’s website.

What’s changing?

    PC Number: 2017-0580
    Date: 2017-06-02
    His Excellency the Governor General in Council, on the recommendation of the Minister of Industry, pursuant to section 91 of An Act to promote the efficiency and adaptability of the Canadian economy by regulating certain activities that discourage reliance on electronic means of carrying out commercial activities, and to amend the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Act, the Competition Act, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and the Telecommunications Act, chapter 23 of the Statutes of Canada, 2010, amends Order in Council P.C. 2013-1323 of December 3, 2013 by repealing paragraph (c).

Referenced paragraph in the Order in Council P.C. 2013-1323

    (c) July 1, 2017 as the day on which sections 47 to 51 and 55 of the Act come into force.

The net result is that the PRA will be delayed until another Order in Council is issued announcing a new enforcement date. This will likely come after the scheduled parliamentary review of CASL, but as of now no new dates have been provided.

However this change will not impact the scheduled end of Section 66 which covers the grandfathering of implied consents for the three year transition period from before the initial enforcement of CASL on July 1, 2014. For your reference:

TRANSITIONAL PROVISIONS

    66. A person’s consent to receiving commercial electronic messages from another person is implied until the person gives notification that they no longer consent to receiving such messages from that other person or until three years after the day on which section 6 comes into force, whichever is earlier, if, when that section comes into force,
    (a) those persons have an existing business relationship or an existing non-business relationship, as defined in subsection 10(10) or (13), respectively, without regard to the period mentioned in that subsection; and
    (b) the relationship includes the communication between them of commercial electronic messages.