Serving Canadian clients from the UK

PIPEDA covers private-sector personal information nationally, but three provinces have their own substantially stricter private-sector laws: Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia. Quebec's Law 25 is the demanding one.

Law 25 adds requirements that PIPEDA does not: privacy by design as an obligation rather than a practice, mandatory privacy impact assessments for higher-risk processing, a designated privacy officer for organisations meeting certain thresholds, and stricter rules on transferring personal data outside Quebec. It also carries administrative fines from the Commission d'accès à l'information.

The practical approach is to build to Law 25 if there is any chance of Quebec data, rather than retrofitting. It is not a large amount of extra engineering, and it removes a class of problem entirely.

This is the one people outside Quebec underestimate. Bill 96 strengthened the Charter of the French Language: consumer-facing commercial services and websites operating in Quebec generally need to be available in French, not merely tolerated in it. A marketing site or checkout that is English-only can be in scope.

This is a content and hosting decision as much as a translation one, and it interacts with SEO because the French version needs to be a genuinely good page rather than a thin duplicate. We can build and architect for it, and we will be straight that a machine translation is not a real answer to a legal requirement.

Canadian tax is GST plus HST in participating provinces or PST in the rest - a different structure from VAT and from US sales tax. Quoted figures are net of tax, and the applicable rate depends on where your business is registered.

We invoice in CAD. You will need a Canadian tax number - BN, GST/HST number or a business number - for us to invoice correctly, and Canadian withholding rules are a matter for your advisers.

Canadian accessibility obligations come from the Accessible Canada Act federally and from provincial legislation, with Ontario's AODA being the most frequently encountered in practice. The technical target is CAN/ASC-EN 301, which aligns with WCAG 2.1 AA.

Ontario's AODA has had compliance reporting in place for years, which means the obligation is not theoretical for anyone trading with the province. We build to WCAG 2.2 AA and test with assistive technology, and provide the documentation your accessibility policy needs.