Recording meetings in Canada.

Section 184 of the Criminal Code prohibits intercepting private communications, subject to an exception where one of the parties has consented. That is why Canada is described as a one-party consent jurisdiction. Separately, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act governs how private-sector organisations handle personal information, supervised by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

The important point is that these answer different questions. One-party consent disposes of the criminal issue; it says nothing about whether you may then use, keep or share the recording. PIPEDA requires meaningful consent and a purpose a reasonable person would consider appropriate, which is a higher bar than simply being permitted to press record. Canada is also federal: several provinces have their own private-sector privacy statutes that displace PIPEDA, and Quebec's Law 25 in particular is materially stricter and closer in spirit to the GDPR than to the federal baseline.

The data protection instrument

Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act), PIPEDA, S.C. 2000, c. 5

Who supervises this

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada)

Criminal provisions

These sit alongside data protection law rather than replacing it. They generally address conduct that is covert or that involves conversations the recorder was not part of, which is a narrower category than everyday meeting recording, and a considerably more serious one.

What to do in practice

The practice below is not the legal minimum in every jurisdiction. It is the practice that is defensible in all of them, which is a more useful target when your calls cross borders.

• Say it out loud at the start, before anything substantive is discussed, and say what the recording is for. Not a line in the invite nobody read.
• Give people a real way to decline. An announcement that leaves no room to object is closer to a notification than to consent.
• Write it down. A line in the notes recording that the meeting was recorded, and that nobody objected, is worth more later than anyone's memory of the moment.
• Keep external meetings to a higher standard than internal ones. Colleagues share an employment context; a customer, a candidate, or a supplier does not.
• Decide how long you keep recordings, and actually delete them. Indefinite retention converts a small, well-handled recording into a growing liability.
• Treat sharing as a fresh decision. The question is not whether you were allowed to record, it is whether this particular person was meant to hear it.

Questions