CASL regulates the message and the sender, not who wrote the words. What changes with AI is the failure rate, because a model removes the friction that used to limit how much a small firm sent.
Key takeaways
Yes. CASL regulates the message and the sender, and is entirely indifferent to who or what composed the text. section 6 of Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation prohibits sending a commercial electronic message to an electronic address unless the recipient has consented — expressly or by implication — and the message itself complies with subsection 6(2).
So the compliance question is unchanged. What changes is the failure rate, because a model removes the friction that used to limit how many messages a small firm sent. A handful of campaigns a year, written by one marketing coordinator, fails differently from an unbounded stream of generated variants nobody counted.
Subsection 6(2) requires prescribed identifying information, contact information enabling the recipient to reach the sender, and an unsubscribe mechanism meeting section 11. The Electronic Commerce Protection Regulations (CRTC) fill in the detail: the name the sender carries on business under, the name of any person on whose behalf the message is sent, a statement of which is which, and a mailing address plus a telephone number, email address or web address. Where it is impractical to include all of it, that information and the unsubscribe mechanism may sit on a readily accessible web page reached by a clear and prominent link.
Variant sprawl. A model will happily produce forty subject lines and forty bodies. Each of those is a message that must carry the identifiers and a working unsubscribe. If the template is the compliance artifact and the variants are generated downstream of it, you are fine. If the variants are generated first and the footer is pasted in by hand, you will eventually ship one without it.
Broken merge fields. The most common CASL defect in AI-assisted sending is not a missing unsubscribe clause — it is an unsubscribe link that renders as a literal placeholder because the generated HTML did not match the sending platform’s token syntax. Send a real test to a real address and click it.
List enrichment. Asking a tool to find contacts and their addresses produces a list with no consent record attached. CASL puts the onus of proving consent on the sender, so an enriched list is a liability the moment it is loaded. Our companion piece on proving CASL consent covers what a defensible record looks like.
Claims the model made up. A generated email that says your firm cuts turnaround in half is a representation to the public, and that is a Competition Act problem as well as a marketing one — see whether you can say your firm is AI-powered.
Suppression applied at the wrong moment. Unsubscribes have to be honoured against the list at send time. A campaign drafted on Monday and sent on Friday against a Monday extract will mail people who left on Wednesday.
The Act defines a commercial electronic message by reference to purpose: having regard to the content, the hyperlinks and the contact information, would it be reasonable to conclude that one of its purposes is to encourage participation in a commercial activity. An electronic address means an address used to send a message to an email account, an instant messaging account, a telephone account or any similar account — so the analysis is not limited to email. the CRTC publishes the regulator’s own overview of the regime.
There are narrow exceptions in subsections 6(5) and 6(6) — among them a message sent to a person engaged in a commercial activity that consists solely of an inquiry related to that activity, and messages that solely provide a requested quote or confirm a transaction the recipient already agreed to. They are narrower than most marketing plans assume. Treadstone’s sister firm sets out the business-to-business exemption and the unsubscribe requirements in plain language.
A twelve-person Ontario consulting firm builds a nurture sequence with a generative tool: five emails, three audience variants, fifteen messages in total. The partner running it does three things before the first send.
First, the footer block — business name, mailing address, phone and web address, and the platform’s unsubscribe token — is locked into the template, not into the prompt. Second, all fifteen render into a preview inbox and every unsubscribe link is clicked once. Third, the list is filtered at send time against the suppression list rather than against a copy exported the week before.
None of that required a lawyer. It required deciding that the compliance elements live in the template and the model only ever writes the body copy above them.
This is your firm marketing itself. If the question is about the delivery work you do for clients, that sits elsewhere in this hub. For the underlying law, see CASL email marketing compliance for Ontario businesses and CASL penalties and CRTC complaints.
Does a newsletter count?
If a purpose of it is to encourage participation in a commercial activity — and a firm newsletter that ends in a call to book something usually is — then yes, it is a commercial electronic message and needs consent, identification and an unsubscribe.
Do I have to disclose that an email was AI-written?
CASL contains no such requirement. Whether you should is a separate judgement, and if the message makes claims about your service, the general impression it conveys is what matters under the Competition Act.
Does this apply to messages sent through a social platform?
The definition of electronic address covers email, instant messaging, telephone and similar accounts. Treat direct messages as in scope and take advice on the specific channel rather than assuming it is exempt.
What if the tool sends on our behalf?
Section 6(1) reaches sending, causing to be sent, and permitting to be sent. Outsourcing the mechanics does not outsource the obligation, and the regulations require the message to identify both the sender and the person on whose behalf it is sent.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself here.
