Canada's calling hours and DNC record-keeping rules explained

The permitted calling windows

Canada's CRTC (Canada) telemarketing rules set hard time boundaries for outbound calls. Businesses may only contact consumers during the following windows, measured in the consumer's local time:

• Weekdays (Monday – Friday): 9:00 am to 9:30 pm
• Weekends (Saturday and Sunday): 10:00 am to 6:00 pm

The 9:30 pm weekday cutoff is 30 minutes later than the 9:00 pm cutoff used in many US state rules, but the weekend window closes a full hour earlier than some operators expect — 6:00 pm rather than 7:00 pm. If your team dials across multiple time zones within Canada, each province's local time governs, so a campaign that ends at 9:30 pm Eastern is still placing calls into 6:30 pm Pacific — inside the permitted window there, but double-check Mountain and Atlantic zones to avoid edge cases.

How VICIdial enforces calling hours

VICIdial's Permitted calling hours feature lets you define calling windows at the campaign level, keyed to the consumer's GMT offset (lead). When a lead's local time falls outside the configured window, VICIdial holds the record in the Hopper rather than passing it to the dialer. No manual monitoring needed — the dialer simply will not present out-of-window leads to agents.

For Canadian campaigns, set weekday hours to 09:00–21:30 and weekend hours to 10:00–18:00. Apply the consumer's provincial time zone via the GMT offset field on each lead record when you load your list.

The calling-hours decision flow

flowchart TD
  A[Lead ready to dial] --> B{Weekday or weekend?}
  B -- Weekday --> C{Local time 09:00 to 21:30?}
  B -- Weekend --> D{Local time 10:00 to 18:00?}
  C -- Yes --> E[Place call]
  C -- No --> F[Hold in hopper]
  D -- Yes --> E
  D -- No --> F
  F --> G[Re-evaluate at next window open]
  E --> H{Consumer opts out?}
  H -- Yes --> I[Add to internal DNC list]
  I --> J[Retain 3 years + 31 days]

Internal DNC record-keeping obligations

Beyond the national DNCL, Canadian regulations require every business to maintain its own Internal DNC list. When a consumer asks not to be called, the business must add that person's name and number to its internal list and keep the record there for 3 years and 31 days from the date of the request.

The "31 days" addition to the 3-year baseline is not a typo — it is a deliberate buffer built into the Canadian rules. Practically, this means your database needs to store the exact opt-out date and must not purge the record until 3 years and 31 days have elapsed from that date.

In VICIdial, Campaign DNC lists handle the suppression side. The retention obligation is a data-management question: export DNC opt-outs to a timestamped archive and enforce the deletion floor in your data retention policy rather than relying on VICIdial's list management alone.

Request-for-information recency

Canada gives businesses a 6-month window to follow up with consumers who previously submitted a request for information — twice as long as the 3-month window under US rules. This wider window can extend the life of warm leads in your Lead list, but it also means your recency filters need to be set to 180 days rather than 90 days when running Canadian campaigns.

Putting it together

A compliant Canadian campaign needs three things working in concert: a clean DNCL suppression pull loaded before launch, calling-hours windows configured per province time zone, and a DNC archive that timestamps opt-outs and enforces the 3-year-31-day floor. Miss any one of these and the others cannot compensate.

For broader context on how Canadian rules compare to the US framework, see the VICIfast compliance overview.

For a deeper look at how the DNCL and the US federal DNC registry compare, read what Canada's DNCL is and how it differs from the US DNC list.

Ready to configure compliant Canadian campaigns in VICIdial? See VICIfast pricing to get started.