I’m not saying Canadian truth-in-advertising laws are perfect, but I just got a promotional email with five separate footnoted disclaimers in the space of as many sentences, and it’s kind of fun to see exactly how they plan to screw you over clearly outlined in bulleted list format.
I still get business-to-business emails for a certain industry, and I often get both the American-directed and Canadian-directed emails. Now, truth in advertising doesn’t exactly apply to B2B advertising, but it did change what precedents were set with relation to fraud.
And now and again, you do get two wildly different emails, mostly of the variety where some claims just … don’t appear in the Canadian version of the email. Rows missing off comparison tables and the like. My holy grail, should I ever receive it, will be when the Canadian version simply makes no claims whatsoever.I think my favourite example that I’ve encountered of promotional claims varying by jurisdiction is a breakfast cereal where the front of the American packaging says it contains 22 essential vitamins and minerals, but the front of the Canadian packaging for the exact same cereal with the exact same listed ingredients only says it contains 9 essential vitamins and minerals.