Canada
AI behavior law: bot and agent disclosure, crawler and training-data rules, automated-agent transactions, and algorithmic decision-making.
Summary
Canada's unauthorized-computer-access offence (Criminal Code §342.1) requires access 'fraudulently and without colour of right'; publicly accessible pages carry an implicit colour of right for general browsing, and no Canadian court has applied §342.1 to public-page scraping. The Supreme Court of Canada's CCH Canadian (2004) applied a high originality threshold, effectively ruling out a sui generis database right. Copyright Act fair dealing (§29) is narrow and lacks a TDM exception; AI-TDM is unsettled pending ISED consultation. PIPEDA (CPPA/Bill C-27 pending) applies with no broad publicly-available exemption, and the OPC determined Clearview AI's scraping of public images violated PIPEDA (2021). ToS enforceability is notice-dependent.
Automated-access legality
Carried forward from the crawler-law index. Governs whether automated clients may access public websites in this jurisdiction.
| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Authorization test | colour of right |
| Public-page carve-out | yes |
| Terms-of-service browsewrap enforceable | notice dependent |
| Terms-of-service clickwrap enforceable | yes |
| Copyright exception model | fair dealing narrow |
| Text and data mining — commercial status | unsettled |
| Text and data mining — opt-out mechanism | none |
| robots.txt legal weight | non binding notice |
| AI training-specific law | pending |
| Privacy regime | PIPEDA (CPPA pending) |
| Trespass to chattels | not recognized |
Last reviewed: 2026-05-21. Confidence: medium. Not legal advice.