Law 25 changed the rules. Most Canadian sites haven’t caught up.

PIPEDA is the federal law covering how private businesses collect, use and share personal information. It reaches across the country, except where a business operates wholly inside Quebec, Alberta or BC: those provinces have their own private-sector privacy laws that stand in its place, though PIPEDA still follows the data once it crosses a provincial or national border. We build the essentials in by design: asking permission, saying what the data is for, letting people see what you hold, scrambling (encrypting) it on the move and in storage, and keeping logs that help if data ever leaks. It is part of the build, not bolted on later.

Law 25 (Loi 25) is Quebec's privacy law for private businesses, and it can apply the moment your site collects data from someone in Quebec. The build implication we design around: functions that identify, locate or profile a visitor are not off by default: the visitor turns them on. We ship consent flows and default-private settings that work that way, handling cookies by what they actually do rather than by a blanket banner, plus privacy rights that are easy to find and a named privacy-officer contact.

If you do business in Quebec, the Charter of the French Language (as amended by Bill 96) reaches commercial publications, and that includes websites: where a version exists in another language, the French one is expected to be at least as accessible and as good. So for the Quebec market we build genuine English-French sites: the French version is at least as easy to reach, not buried behind extra clicks while English loads first. Both languages get the same content and the same quality of typography.

Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) starts from consent: usually an explicit opt-in, though it recognises implied consent in defined cases. We wire your sign-up forms to capture and record that agreement, name the sender clearly on every message, and put a working unsubscribe on all of them, so your email is on solid ground from launch.

We build to WCAG 2.1 Level AA as a baseline whatever your province: in Ontario that is the standard the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) points to for public web content, for public sector bodies and for organisations with 50 or more employees. That means keyboard navigation, screen-reader support, enough colour contrast, accessible forms and image descriptions, checked as we build rather than scrambled together at the end.

We quote in Canadian dollars (CAD) and scope each job to what you actually need (a marketing site, a bilingual platform, or a custom web app), so you know the cost before we start. We work with businesses across Canada, including Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary, remotely and on site where it helps.