Privacy

Boreal Trade operates this site and decides what happens to anything you send through it. Our address and email are at the foot of this page, and any question about this policy, or any request about your own information, should go to that address.

Five things on this site have a form behind them: the Canadian exporter enquiry, the Southeast Asian buyer enquiry, the enquiry from producers selling into Canada, the directory listing claim, and the download of a gated library article.

They ask for your name, your work email address and your company name. Depending on the form they also ask for your company website, and in the case of a buyer enquiry your company registration number, because a requirement we publish has to come from a company we can establish exists.

The rest of what we receive is whatever you choose to type into the free-text boxes.

Every submission also records the page you were on when you sent it, and the market or product you were reading about. That is there so we can answer your question in context rather than asking you to repeat yourself.

Please do not send anything confidential through a web form. Specifications, pricing, contracts and anything a competitor would like to read deserve a better channel than an unencrypted form on a website. Send us a line, and we will give you one.

We read it, and we reply to it.

A submission is validated for obvious errors and then emailed to our own inbox through Resend, the email service we use. It is not written to a database, because this site does not have one. It does not join a mailing list, because we do not run one. We do not sell it, rent it, trade it, or pass it to anybody in the business of buying contact details.

Two copies exist. The email itself, which sits in our inbox. And a line in our hosting provider's server log recording that a submission happened, which includes the email address it came from. That log rotates on the provider's own schedule and we do not export it anywhere.

If you ask us to delete an enquiry, we delete the email and confirm in writing that it is gone.

The booking buttons open cal.com, which is a separate company. Whatever you type into their page, including your name, your email and anything you write in the notes, is collected by cal.com under their own privacy policy, and they pass us the booking so that we can turn up.

If you would rather not use them, email us and we will arrange a time by hand.

We use Google Analytics. It sets cookies in your browser and tells us which pages get read, roughly where in the world readers are, what device and browser they use, and how they arrived. We look at that in aggregate to decide what to research and write next. We do not use it to identify individual readers, and we do not connect it to enquiries.

You can refuse it. Blocking cookies in your browser settings works, so does Google's own analytics opt-out add-on, and so does any of the common blockers. Nothing on this site stops working if you do.

Two more things reach third parties on every page load, and we would rather name them than let you find out yourself. The typefaces load from Google Fonts, and the photography loads from Unsplash. Requesting those files tells Google and Unsplash your IP address and which page asked for them. Neither is used by us for anything.

Beyond the analytics cookie, this site sets nothing. It has no login, no session, no tracking pixel, no advertising tag, and nothing stored in your browser that we read back.

Our hosting, email, analytics and scheduling providers are United States companies, and information you send is processed on their systems outside Canada.

That matters and is worth stating plainly: while information is held in another country, the courts and authorities of that country may be able to require access to it under their own law, and Canadian privacy law cannot prevent that. If it is a concern for your business, contact us by telephone instead and nothing about the conversation passes through those systems.

An enquiry email stays in our inbox while the enquiry is commercially live, and afterwards as part of our record of who we have spoken to and what we said. We are not going to pretend to a fixed number of months that we would then fail to honour.

Analytics data is held for the retention period set on the Google Analytics property. Server logs rotate on our hosting provider's schedule.

At any point you can ask us to delete what we hold about you, and the answer is yes.

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask for a copy of it, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, and withdraw your consent to us holding it at all. Email the address at the foot of this page. We will answer within 30 days, and normally faster than that.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled a request, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

The directory describes companies, not people. Entries are compiled from public government registers and from each company's own published material, and they carry the source and the date for every regulatory value in them, the same as the rest of the site.

If your company is listed and you want the entry corrected, updated or taken down, tell us and we will do it. We will not ask you to justify the request.

This site is for people doing their job. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.

The date at the top of this page is the date the wording last changed. If we change it in a way that affects what we collect or who receives it, we will say so here rather than quietly revising the text.