Advertising in Canada (especially in Quebec)

Advertising plays a major role in every business or organizations' daily operational activities, in fact 60% of their budgets is advised to be allocated to marketing. It is therefore very common that businesses and organizations work very hard and send a lot of money coming up with different ideas and campaigns on how to attract consumers to their doors. It is obvious then that regulations must be put into place to legislate this behavior, to ensure consumer protection and trust, and to control business to business competition. That is the role of the Consumer Protection Act (CPA) and the Competition Act.

There are two associations in Canada that regulate and make sure the CPA is properly enforced by creating Advertising Standards. The Canadian Marketing Association (CMA) that published "The Code of Ethics & Standards of Practice." And The Advertising Standards Canada (ASC) who enforce the 14 Standards and allow consumers to complain to them if they encounter any issues with businesses (to read more about these two agencies and their operations just follow their links to their sites).

Recently more and more complaints have been taken to court regarding two main issues found here in Quebec. 1) Advertising geared toward children under the age of 13 (CPA Sections 248 and 249), and 2) Price Fixing (CPA sections 219 - 231).

The CPA offices are currently mostly after those that are advertising geared to children as a recent case of Saputo Inc. that got fined for up to $44 000. Others that are on the target list are companies like Mcdonalds, Burger King, and others.

The trend seems to be moving closely to the Price Fixing yet it is still undetermined how fast The CPA offices will record any victories in that field since the law is quite satisfied as long as the sections mentioned above are respected by using symbols such as asterix (*) crosses (†) footnotes (¹) and others. These fine prints as long as they are legible and meet all criteria is very hard to fight. Although those companies that omit information in their fine print footnotes or totally omit the footnote all together are in for a big one - as it was just recently proposed to raise the fines to $10 million for corporations and $750 000 for individuals including other such reforms that can be found here (part 12 section 74.1).

To see and read recent complaints of price fixing you can visit ASC's website where they publish an annual report and a quarterly complaints report that summarizes all the complaints they receive and in which category each of these complaints fall under.