Serving Quebec from outside Quebec: when Law 25 and Law 96 still reach you

A business based in Ontario, Alberta or the United States can still fall under Quebec's Law 25 and Law 96. Law 96 can reach a company that has Quebec clients or offers services accessible from Quebec; Law 25 attaches to the collection of personal information about people in Quebec. Incorporating elsewhere does not decide the question.

If you answer calls from Quebec, this is worth ten minutes.

Law 96 — the language obligation

Published guidance is that the Charter can apply if your business is based in another Canadian province and any of the following holds: you have clients in Quebec, you offer goods or services accessible from Quebec — in person or online — or you communicate regularly with Quebec consumers.

For a phone line the practical trigger is having a number Quebec customers call, or serving Quebec customers on any number.

What follows if it applies: service offered in French, which for telephone means the greeting, the menu, and the announcements around them. Law 96 and your phone system covers the shape.

Law 25 — the privacy obligation

Law 25 governs personal information collected in the course of business in Quebec. Location of the server does not exempt you — if anything it does the opposite, because the transfer obligation is triggered by information leaving Quebec.

So an out-of-province business serving Quebec customers can find itself both subject to the statute and performing exactly the cross-border communication the statute asks it to assess first. Where your call data lives covers that assessment.

The realistic list for a phone line

If you take calls from Quebec:

• the greeting is in French, with a brief offer of another language
• recording announcements are in French, and name a purpose
• someone is named as responsible for personal information, with contact details published
• an impact assessment exists before Quebec personal information is stored outside Quebec
• a register of confidentiality incidents exists, covering call records

None requires a Quebec entity. All require a decision.

What does not follow

A few things worth not concluding:

• It does not mean you must store data in Quebec. The obligation is to assess the transfer, not avoid it.
• It does not mean every employee must speak French. It means service is offered in French.
• It does not scale only with headcount. The 25-employee threshold governs OQLF registration and francization, not the underlying duty to serve in French.

Where Ringfully is

We are not yet incorporated, which is stated on every policy page rather than implied, and our data is in AWS us-east-1 in the United States. Neither fact exempts a Quebec-serving customer from anything above — and both are the sort of thing you should be able to establish about a vendor without asking.

Our sub-processor list is published in full, with no form and no login, naming each party and what it receives.

A description of what the statutes ask, not legal advice. Whether either applies to your business is a fact-specific question for a Quebec-qualified adviser, and cheaper to answer before you start than after.