Recording Phone Calls in Canada: One-Party Consent Rule

Canada is a one-party consent country: if you are taking part in a phone call, you can legally record it yourself, without telling the other person or getting their permission.

The short answer: one-party consent, no exceptions by province

Unlike the United States, where roughly a dozen states require every participant's consent before a call can be recorded, Canada has a single federal rule that applies from coast to coast. There is no "two-party consent province" anywhere in Canada. Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia, and every other province and territory follow the same Criminal Code standard, because wiretapping and interception of private communications are matters of federal criminal law, not provincial jurisdiction.

That rule is one-party consent. As long as you are one of the people on the call, either the person who placed it or the person who received it, you can record the conversation on your own initiative and keep that recording, without warning the other party. This applies to personal calls, calls with a business, and calls you make to a government office.

Where the rule comes from: Criminal Code sections 183 and 184

The governing law is Part VI of the Criminal Code, RSC 1985, c C-46, the part dealing with invasion of privacy.

Section 184(1) creates the offence: everyone who, by means of an electro-magnetic, acoustic, mechanical, or other device, wilfully intercepts a private communication commits an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years. "Private communication" is defined in section 183 to include telephone calls where at least one party has a reasonable expectation that no one other than the intended recipient would intercept it.

Section 184(2)(a) is the exception that makes ordinary one-party recording lawful. It provides that section 184(1) does not apply to a person who has the consent, express or implied, of the originator of the communication or of the person intended by the originator to receive it, to intercept the communication. In practice, this means the person recording is almost always one of those two people, so their own participation in the call is itself the consent the section requires. You do not need the other side's permission because the law already treats your own presence on the line as sufficient authorization.

This is why lawyers describe Canada's standard as "one-party consent": only ONE party (you) needs to consent, not both or all.

What is NOT covered by the one-party exception

The exception in section 184(2)(a) protects a person who is actually a party to the call. It does not protect someone who secretly bugs a phone line, plants a recording device in a room to capture a conversation they are not part of, or intercepts a call between two other people. That conduct falls squarely inside the section 184(1) offence and can carry up to five years in prison. It can also expose the person to civil liability and, depending on the circumstances, a wiretap-style investigation by police, since intercepting communications you are not party to is itself a serious criminal matter, not a privacy technicality.

There are narrow, separately authorized exceptions for law enforcement acting under a judicial authorization, and for network operators maintaining their own systems, but those are institutional carve-outs and not something a private individual can rely on.

R v Duarte: a limit on the STATE, not on private citizens

The leading Supreme Court of Canada authority on recorded private communications is R v Duarte, [1990] 1 SCR 30. In that case, police had an informant wear a hidden device to record a conversation with the accused, without prior judicial authorization. The Supreme Court held that this kind of participant surveillance, engineered and directed by the state, breaches section 8 of the Charter, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure. The Court reasoned that people do not assume the risk that the state itself will be secretly recording their conversations through a participant, even though they do assume the risk that the other person might repeat what was said.

Duarte is a constraint on police and government actors, not on private individuals. It does not change the section 184(2)(a) exception for ordinary one-party recording between private citizens. A private person recording their own call is not conducting a state search, so Duarte's Charter analysis simply does not apply to them. It is a common misreading to cite Duarte for the proposition that all one-party recording is somehow constitutionally suspect. It is not. Duarte is about what police need a warrant for, not about what a private citizen can lawfully do with their own phone.

Recording lawfully is not the same as USING it lawfully

The Criminal Code answers whether you can press record. It does not answer whether you can publish, broadcast, forward, or otherwise use the recording afterward. Those questions sit with a different set of laws:

• Provincial privacy torts. Several provinces recognize statutory or common-law privacy torts. Ontario recognizes the tort of intrusion upon seclusion from Jones v Tsige, 2012 ONCA 32, which can apply where someone's handling of private information, including a recording, is highly offensive to a reasonable person. Publishing a lawfully made recording in a way that humiliates or exposes someone can still generate civil liability even though the recording itself was legal to make.
• Defamation. Sharing a recording alongside false or damaging characterizations of what it shows can support a defamation claim, independent of whether the recording itself was lawful.
• PIPEDA and provincial equivalents. If an organization, rather than an individual acting in a personal capacity, is the one recording or storing the call, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), SC 2000, c 5, or Quebec's Law 25, Alberta's PIPA, or BC's PIPA can impose obligations around notice, consent, and retention that go beyond the Criminal Code baseline. These statutes govern organizations in the course of commercial activity; they generally do not apply to an individual recording a personal call for personal reasons.

Businesses recording customer calls

When a business records calls with customers, most commonly the familiar "this call may be recorded for quality and training purposes" notice, it is acting as an organization under PIPEDA, not as a one-party consenter under the Criminal Code alone. PIPEDA's Schedule 1 principles require the organization to identify its purposes for collecting personal information and to obtain meaningful consent. In practice this means giving the customer notice, typically at the start of the call, and treating continuation of the call as implied consent to the stated purpose. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), which enforces PIPEDA, has issued findings emphasizing that consent must be meaningful and that the purpose of recording should be clearly identified, not buried in fine print. An organization that records without any notice, or that uses a recording made for quality assurance for an unrelated purpose like marketing, risks a PIPEDA complaint to the OPC even if no Criminal Code offence occurred.

Recordings as evidence

A recording made lawfully under section 184(2)(a) is generally admissible as evidence in a Canadian civil or family law proceeding, subject to the ordinary rules of relevance, authenticity, and the court's discretion to exclude evidence whose prejudicial effect outweighs its probative value. Courts have admitted recordings made by one party to calls, meetings, and conversations in family law, employment, and contract disputes. Admissibility is a separate legal question from whether the recording was made lawfully, and a judge retains discretion over how much weight to give a covertly made recording, particularly if it appears to have been engineered to provoke a particular reaction.

Video without audio: a different legal box

Section 184 is about intercepting a private communication, which the Criminal Code ties to acoustic or similar interception, not silent video. A security camera or dash cam that records video only, with no audio, is not "intercepting a private communication" under Part VI. That kind of recording is instead governed by privacy law and tort principles, and can raise separate issues, including the offence of voyeurism under Criminal Code s 162 where someone is observed or recorded in circumstances that give rise to a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as a washroom, changeroom, or through a hidden device for a sexual purpose. The civil tort of intrusion upon seclusion from Jones v Tsige can also apply to surreptitious video recording in a way it would to an unlawfully obtained phone recording.

Quick reference table

Where this fits with the rest of Canadian recording and privacy law

This one-party rule for phone calls is the same rule that governs recording conversations generally in Canada; see the national overview at Canada Recording Laws for how it applies to in-person conversations, meetings, and other contexts. If the call or conversation happens at work, additional workplace-specific considerations come into play; see Recording Conversations at Work in Canada. For the separate question of what a business must do with the personal information it collects, including recorded calls, see PIPEDA Explained.

Disclaimer: This article provides general legal information about recording phone calls in Canada and is not legal advice. Recording laws can interact with privacy, employment, and provincial rules in ways specific to your situation. Consult a licensed lawyer in your province for advice on your circumstances.