Canada's Specialized Dental Marketing Agency · Serving Dental Clinics Coast to Coast
The rules that govern your licence, not the ones that govern a practice in Texas
Most dental marketing advice online is American, and a striking amount of it describes things a Canadian practice is prohibited from doing. This is the reference we work from: what your provincial college restricts, what CASL and privacy law require on top, and how to run effective campaigns inside all of it. Every rule below is quoted from the source and cited.
Three separate regimes, and satisfying one says nothing about the others
There is no national dental advertising standard and no single Canadian rulebook. Three separate regimes apply to every practice, and a campaign can clear one while breaching another.
Dentistry is regulated provincially. The college that issued your certificate of registration sets your advertising rules, regardless of where your patients or your agency are. In Ontario that is Regulation 853/93 under the Dentistry Act, 1991, at section 2, paragraphs 60 and 61.
Canada's anti-spam legislation governs every commercial electronic message, email and SMS alike. It runs on consent rather than opt-out, the onus of proving consent sits with the sender, and directors can be personally liable.
Patient information is governed separately again. Implied consent covers providing care. Marketing is not care, and published guidance for regulated health professionals requires express consent for marketing and market research.
Quoted from the regulation, not paraphrased
Ontario Regulation 853/93 makes it professional misconduct to publish advertising related to your practice containing any of the following. This is the operative list, in the regulation's own words.
Four items from the RCDSO advisory appear on a very large share of Canadian dental websites, and almost nobody discusses them.
Prohibited by name: "incentive programs, including giveaways, contests, draws or free products or services". The new patient special, the free whitening promotion and the social contest all sit on this line.
Prohibited: "reference to your continuing education, or membership or positions at the College or in societies, associations, academies or similar institutions". The affiliations logo strip is directly implicated.
Prohibited: "reference to any degrees or diplomas other than those relating to the degrees or diplomas required for you to obtain a certificate of registration from this College".
Prohibited, with examples: "state of the art", "cutting edge", "or any other words or phrases to suggest a higher quality". The catch-all means a synonym does not solve it.
Eight provinces compared from primary sources
Enormously, and far more than most practices assume. Build a national campaign to the strictest province in your footprint, because the campaign publishes everywhere but each licensee is judged by their own college.
All comparative advertising prohibited outright. The testimonial rule reaches beyond advertising into any public intervention, so a dentist quoted on a podcast is caught. A regular price must hold 90 days. Every advertisement retained for five years. Guaranteeing a treatment is a disciplinary offence.
Neither has a college rule on testimonials, photographs, superlatives or guarantees. That is not the same as no rule: general misleading-advertising law and the Competition Act still apply, and the BC standard cross-references them directly.
Manitoba requires clinical photographs to identify who provided the treatment. Saskatchewan requires practice names to be pre-approved and bars staff names from advertising. And "dental surgeon" is permitted in British Columbia while its use is a violation in New Brunswick.
Nova Scotia's advertising regulations, the document most marketing articles still cite, were repealed on 1 May 2025 and the board was continued under a new name. A stricter standard replaced them. A proposal citing the old regulation was not written from current law.
Eight guides, each answering one question properly
This page is the overview. Each question below has a full guide behind it, written from the regulations and dated. Start with whichever one you are actually worried about.
In Ontario, no. The prohibition arrives through a clause about verifiability rather than a rule naming testimonials, which is why it also catches "our patients love us" and "gentle, caring team".
Ten specialties are recognised in Canada. Cosmetic dentistry is not one of them, and neither is implant, sedation or sleep dentistry. Every page naming a treatment also triggers a disclosure duty.
CASL runs on consent, not opt-out. Implied consent expires, the onus of proof is yours, and directors can be personally liable. Most reactivation campaigns are built on assumptions that do not hold.
Custom audiences, tracking pixels, CRMs and cross-border storage. The layer nobody audits, where marketing use of patient information requires express consent.
Ontario's advisory does not mention photographs at all. Manitoba has the only on-point rule in the country, and it requires attribution. The caption usually decides compliance, not the image.
Google approves ad copy your college prohibits, and it will never flag the difference. Which patterns are risky, and who is liable for automatically generated assets.
Eight provinces across six dimensions, from primary sources, with the multi-province landmines that a national template will breach without anyone noticing.
Eleven standard US tactics against the Canadian rules that restrict each one, including why a revenue-share marketing fee is the wrong structure for an Ontario practice.
Looking for something broader? The full dental marketing resource library covers search, paid acquisition and patient conversion as well as compliance.
The constraint is an advantage once you accept it
A great deal. Every restricted tactic is one any competitor with a budget could copy in an afternoon. When the whole market is prevented from using them, what is left to compete on is being genuinely findable, genuinely informative and genuinely responsive. Those are harder to copy and they compound.
Canada has roughly eighteen thousand dental practices. Small markets reward depth, because the number of competitors willing to do difficult work is smaller still.
Your provincial regulatory college, and only yours. There is no national dental advertising standard. The college that issued your certificate of registration is the one whose rules apply, regardless of where your patients or your agency are based. Two federal statutes sit on top of that everywhere: CASL for electronic messages and privacy law for patient information.
No. Professional misconduct attaches to the licensed practitioner. The Ontario advisory defines a professional advertisement as material published “whether by you directly or by someone on your behalf”, so an agency writing the copy does not move the exposure. An indemnity clause can move money after the fact. It cannot move your college’s jurisdiction over your licence.
In Ontario, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan the applicable standards prohibit incentive programs including contests, giveaways and free or discounted services. New Brunswick permits discounts if the regular price and inclusions are stated equally prominently. Quebec permits an exceptional price with a stated expiry. A single national offer cannot run uniformly across the country.
Yes. The Ontario definition covers material published “regardless of the form or the manner of distribution”, and it covers material published on your behalf. A results post, a story, a reel, and a post an associate makes from a personal account about work done at your practice are all advertising.
In Ontario yes, with conditions stricter than most practices expect. An advertised fee is treated as the maximum, inclusive of laboratory costs, and it applies to every patient whether or not they saw the advertisement and whether or not they have insurance. Quebec restricts advertisements to a closed list of permitted content and requires a regular price to hold for 90 days.
Search your site for superlatives, check that every page naming a procedure discloses general practitioner or specialist status, find every quoted patient, audit the credentials and affiliations block, and review every offer. Most colleges will also review a proposed advertisement on request, which is a better answer than any agency opinion including ours.
A compliance read of your current marketing, against the rules of your own province.
Send us your website, your current campaigns and the province you practise in. We will tell you what would not survive a look from your college, what to change, and what the fix is worth. No obligation, and we will tell you if the answer is that you are already fine.
Thank you. We'll be in touch shortly. Need us sooner? Call (905) 906-7066.
This is general information, not legal advice. It is written by a marketing agency, not by a lawyer and not by your regulator. Regulations change, they differ by province, and the obligation sits with the licensed practitioner. Confirm anything you intend to rely on with your own college before acting on it.
Ontario provisions are quoted from Ontario Regulation 853/93 under the Dentistry Act, 1991, section 2, paragraphs 60 and 61, as reproduced in the RCDSO Practice Advisory on Professional Advertising. That advisory carries a date of November 2012 and remains the College's current published document, confirmed against the College's own Advertising Guidelines page on 20 August 2026. Provincial comparisons are drawn from each regulator's current published standard. The specialty list is the CDRAF list published by the Canadian Dental Association, current as of March 2024. CASL provisions are from the CRTC's published guidance. The privacy position is from published guidance for regulated health professionals.
Where something could not be confirmed from a primary source it is not stated here as a rule. That includes photograph rules outside Manitoba, the current status of Manitoba's own code, and one clause of the Nova Scotia standard that is missing from the published document's text layer.
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The rules that govern your licence, not the ones that govern a practice in Texas