Stewart McKelvey

7 Doing Business in AtlAntic cAnADA SUMMER 2014 that neither consent, nor compliance with the form and content requirements (such as the unsubscribe mechanism) are required. There are some fairly ob- vious ones in this list (though look at the fine print closely) for family or personal communications, re- sponses to commercial inquiries, internal business communications, legal communications and other fairly obvious examples, but the big exceptions of note for many businesses include: 1 bUsinEss TO bUsinEss COmmUniCATiOns: Com- mercial electronic messages sent between different organizations (or their employees, representatives, or consultants) provided the organizations have a relationship, and the messages concern the activities of the recipient organization. The term "relation- ship" is not defined and will hopefully be inter- preted quite broadly. 2 CHARiTiEs: Messages sent by charities, when the message has the primary purpose of raising funds for the charity, and the charity is a registered charity in accordance with Canada's Income Tax Act. (There is a similar exception as well for political fundraising). If one of the above exceptions does not apply, then there may still be a second group of helpful excep- tions which exclude the requirement for express con- sent. Some such exceptions state that neither express or implied consent is required, and while others state where consent is deemed to be implied. (Always re- member that implied consent may be explicitly re- voked by a recipient.) Neither express or implied By Rob Aske THE nEW AnTi-spAm lAW – THE big ExCEpTiOns

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