Canada’s Anti Spam Legislation
The Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) complies with the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL). This is the law that regulates the use of email, text messages, and other forms of electronic messages, as well as the installation of applications and other computer programs for marketing purposes.
CASL requires all Commercial Electronic Messages (CEMs) to comply with three requirements:
- There must be consent to send CEMs;
- All CEMs must contain the required identification information; and
- All CEMs must contain a functioning unsubscribe mechanism.
Inquiries about a person’s services are exempt from these requirements, as are messages sent between individuals that have a family or personal relationship.
A family relationship is defined as one where the sender and recipient of the message are related to one another through a marriage, common-law partnership, or any legal parent-child relationship and those individuals have had direct, voluntary, two-way communication.
A personal relationship is defined as one where the sender and the recipient of the message have had direct, voluntary, two-way communications and it would be reasonable to conclude that they have a personal relationship, taking into consideration any relevant factors such as the sharing of interests, experiences, opinions and information evidenced in the communications, the frequency of communication, the length of time since the parties communicated or whether the parties have met in person.
Messages sent using the ‘Email a REALTOR®’ and ‘Email a friend’ feature on REALTOR.ca do not contain the required identification information or an unsubscribe link. CREA does not review these emails and cannot verify that users have consent to send these emails. Therefore, it is important that these emails fall under the exemptions to CASL set out above. More information about CASL can be found here: fightspam.gc.ca.
source: https://www.realtor.ca/casl