Recording and consent
Recording a session in Canada.
One party to a Canadian conversation may consent to it being recorded, and in a session that party is the practitioner. That is Criminal Code section 184 and PIPEDA, and the sentence a practitioner says out loud before recording is the same one in every country on this site.
This is a plain summary, not legal advice. Laws change. If the answer matters to your business, check with a lawyer in your own country.
01The sentence
Say this, out loud, before anything else is said.
I am going to record this session so I can write you a proper report afterwards. Is that all right with you?
It is the same sentence everywhere, because a specific disclosure followed by a direct question is what recording guidance favours over a vague notice, and because everybody in the session agreeing is safe in every jurisdiction on this site. What changes by place is who has to answer it.
02Who has to agree
In Canada the rule is one party.
The statute Criminal Code section 184 and PIPEDA
Section 184 of the Criminal Code makes it an offence to intercept a private communication, and subsection 184(2)(a) excepts an interception made with the consent of the originator or the intended recipient. A practitioner in the session is one of those, so recording it is lawful without the client's agreement. Quebec is the province where that answer needs a second look, because its Civil Code and its own private sector privacy law give a person a right to their image and voice that is enforced more readily than elsewhere in the country.
Legally you may record. Professionally, ask, and in Quebec ask and keep the answer, because the right being asserted there is a personality right rather than a data one and it does not have a business size threshold under it.
03A client under 18
What changes when the person in the session is a child.
Canadian privacy regulators treat information about a young person as sensitive, and the federal Privacy Commissioner has said that meaningful consent from a child under 13 should come from a parent. For 13 to 18 the position is that consent can be given directly where the young person genuinely understands, which for a recording used to write a report sent to a parent is a stretch. Ask the guardian.
04The data law
The recording is personal data under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, and the provincial acts in Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia.
PIPEDA applies to commercial activity across most of the country, and Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec have their own substantially similar statutes. Quebec's Law 25 is the strictest of them: it requires a privacy officer to be named publicly, a privacy impact assessment before a new technology that collects personal information is deployed, and explicit consent for anything considered sensitive.
05What Slide Practice does
The audio goes as soon as the report is written.
At upload the practitioner confirms on screen that everyone in the session agreed. That confirmation is stored, and the footer of the report prints the date it was given.
Session audio is deleted as soon as the write-up is made. The The text of what was said, written out from the recording. stays with the The written page a client receives after a session: what was covered, what went well, what they agreed to do, and what is next., on the client's own page, and both are kept until the account is closed. Closing an account starts a 30 day window, at the end of which everything is deleted rather than archived.
Nothing is drafted from a recording until the practitioner has confirmed that everyone agreed, and nothing reaches a client until a person has read it. The whole of what is kept, and for how long, is on the security page and in the privacy policy.
06Where this came from
Two primary sources, and neither of them is us.
- Criminal Code section 184, Justice Laws Website, Government of Canada
- PIPEDA in brief, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
This is a plain summary, not legal advice. Laws change. If the answer matters to your business, check with a lawyer in your own country.
Nearby
- Recording a session in Australia
- Recording a session in New Zealand
- Every jurisdiction, and how permission works in the product
- What the report itself looks like, practice by practice
Bring one recording you already have permission for, and read what comes back. No account and no card.