charities Archives

CASL

CASL enforcement against charities clarified by CRTC

CASL’s rules apply to any person that sends commercial electronic messages to members of the public including charities and other not for profit organizations. The indiscriminate targeting of everyone from real spam culprits to genuine commercial communications is one of the reasons that Terrance Corcoran from the Financial Post recently called Canada’s new anti-spam law “a Monty-Python-esque farce”.

CASL, in its present form, should never have targeted charities or not for profit organizations. According to some, CASL punishes charities for no good reason.…

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Canada’s anti-spam law and universities

Contrary to a popular misconception, Canada’s anti-spam law (CASL) will apply to Canadian universities. Unlike universities and charities in other countries like Australia that have specific exemptions, CASL will impose significant burdens on these organizations even though they are the least likely offenders and have very constrained resources, making compliance even more difficult for them.

When CASL was introduced, the public was told that organizations that did not engage in commercial activities such as charities did not need to worry about CASL because it only applied to the extent their communications involved selling or promoting a product.…

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Will CASL Hurt Charities? Let Us Count The Ways

Charities, including hospitals, universities, orchestras and other similar not-for-profit organizations will be hard hit by Canada’s new anti-spam legislation, known as CASL, when it comes into effect later in 2013. They will face a diminished ability to communicate with their supporters including donors, patients, volunteers, alumni and other beneficiaries thereby leading, inevitably, to reduced funding and support even as administrative burdens and costs go up.

The key problem is that CASL’s reach is very wide, and it therefore catches all sorts of electronic messages that organizations will want to send, even those that don’t seem particularly commercial in nature.…

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Evaluating the IC CASL regulations: the B2B exception and Non-business entities

In a previous post,Evaluating the Industry Canada CASL regulations: why they are needed, I suggested that close scrutiny needs to be given to Industry Canada’s new draft Electronic Commerce Protection Regulations. CASL’s “ban all” structure makes it imperative that generous regulations be adopted to ensure that the goal’s of Canada’s new anti-spam/anti-malware law (CASL) are met. In another post, Evaluating the Industry Canada CASL regulations: how to assess them, I proposed a framework for assessing the regulations.…

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