Where we work · Canada
AI meeting notes in Canada.
Canada gives you a permissive one-party consent rule under the Criminal Code and a patchwork of provincial privacy statutes on top of it — the recording is usually the easy part, the province you are in is not.
Canadian meetings are frequently bilingual and often nowhere near an office. A union grievance meeting in Windsor, a band council session, a mining or forestry site visit flown in from Timmins, a bilingual federal-provincial working group in Ottawa, a clinic case conference — none of them have a meeting link. GetNotes records the room from a phone, transcribes English and French including switching between them mid-discussion, and returns minutes with the decisions and action items with owners already separated from the discussion.
The legal split is what Canadian readers actually need explained. The Criminal Code takes a one-party approach: recording a private conversation is permitted where one of the participants consents, and if you are in the meeting, that can be you. Privacy law is separate and provincial in places — PIPEDA applies federally to commercial activity, while Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia have their own private-sector statutes. Quebec's Law 25 sets the highest bar of the group on consent and transparency, so a Montreal employer's obligations are not a Toronto employer's.
In practice the criminal question is rarely the one that bites. Employment law, collective agreements and professional colleges all impose their own expectations about recording conversations with staff, patients or clients, and those obligations do not disappear because the Criminal Code is permissive. Recording openly, with a stated purpose, is the position that survives all of them. GetNotes is built for that: an announced phone recording on the table, not a silent capture.
This is general information, not legal advice — obligations vary by province, by sector and by the relationship between the people in the room, and a conversation with an employee is not the same as one with a supplier. If you are recording anything a regulator, an arbitrator or a union might later read, tell the room first, keep the audio, and let your own policy rather than a landing page decide what is appropriate.
Where it earns its keep
A bilingual committee or working group
Members speak in whichever official language they prefer, sometimes switching within a single intervention, and the secretary is expected to produce a record both language communities recognise. Transcribing that by hand means translating on the fly and losing nuance. GetNotes transcribes each speaker in the language they used, which leaves the secretary editing rather than reconstructing.
A remote site or camp visit
An engineer flies into a northern camp for two days of walkarounds and supervisor conversations, with patchy connectivity and no chance of a proper write-up until the flight home. Record each conversation on a phone, then upload the files once there is bandwidth. The trip report gets written from what was said rather than from four days of memory.
A union grievance or HR meeting
A grievance hearing needs an accurate account of who said what, because both sides will refer back to it. Everyone in the room knows this, so an openly announced recording is usually easier to agree than a contested set of handwritten notes. GetNotes returns a speaker-labelled transcript alongside the summary, which either side can check against the audio.
How GetNotes works
- Record or upload. Hit record on your phone or laptop in the room — or drop in an audio file you already have. No bot joins anything.
- It writes it down. Every word transcribed, every speaker labelled, in 90+ languages including ones that switch mid-sentence.
- Share the minutes.Summary, decisions, and action items with owners — ready before everyone's back at their desk.
Questions, answered
Can I legally record a meeting I am part of in Canada?
The Criminal Code takes a one-party approach: recording a private conversation is permitted where one participant consents, and that participant can be you. Privacy statutes are separate — PIPEDA federally, plus Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia's own laws — and employment or professional obligations may apply too. Recording openly, with a stated purpose, is the safest position. This is general information, not legal advice.
Does Quebec's Law 25 change how I should use GetNotes?
Law 25 sets a higher bar than the rest of Canada on consent, transparency and how personal information is handled, so a Quebec organisation should expect stricter internal rules about recording meetings and where the audio goes. GetNotes keeps recordings and notes in private storage accessible only to the owning account, but it cannot assess your obligations. Ask your privacy officer before recording client or employee meetings.
How does GetNotes handle meetings that switch between English and French?
It transcribes both, including switching within the same meeting or the same intervention, and applies speaker labels throughout. That means a bilingual committee's record shows each person in the language they actually spoke, rather than a single-language transcript with the other half approximated. The minutes — summary, decisions, action items with owners — are generated from that bilingual transcript.
Is GetNotes priced in Canadian dollars?
No. Pro is $19 per month billed in US dollars, so your card issuer converts it and typically adds a foreign exchange spread, meaning the Canadian amount moves slightly month to month. Your first meeting is free — a one-time trial of up to 30 minutes with no credit card — so you can test a real bilingual meeting before deciding.
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