A dealer in Mississauga texts 4,000 dormant leads on a Friday afternoon. Half the numbers are two years old. Nobody checked when the last contact happened, nobody logged consent type, and the store just ran a US-style blast under Canadian law. That's how a lead reactivation project turns into a CRTC complaint file.
Canadian dealers are not operating under TCPA. They're operating under CASL, and CASL treats old CRM data differently than most US-trained marketing teams assume.
What is CASL, and why does it trip up dealers?
CASL is Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation. It covers commercial electronic messages, which includes SMS, not just email. Unlike TCPA, which is mostly about consent to be called or texted at all, CASL is built around two consent types: express and implied. Most dealer CRMs were never set up to track which type applies to which lead, and that gap is where compliance problems start.
What counts as consent on an old CRM lead?
Express consent means the customer opted in clearly. They checked a box, replied YES to a specific opt-in message, or signed a form that named SMS as a contact method. This consent doesn't expire under CASL and it's the safest thing to text against.
Implied consent is different. It exists because of an existing business relationship, someone inquired about a vehicle, bought one, or had service done. Implied consent is real under CASL, but it's time-limited. That's the part dealers miss when they pull a "dormant lead" list going back three, four, five years and text the whole thing.
Implied consent under CASL generally lasts two years from the date of the last commercial transaction or inquiry. After that window closes, texting the lead without express consent is a CASL violation, even if the lead is sitting right there in your CRM with a phone number attached. Age of the lead matters as much as the fact that it exists.
Does the 2-year window ever reset?
Sometimes. A new inquiry, a service visit, or a trade-in appraisal can restart the clock, because it re-establishes the business relationship. But a dealer can't manufacture a reset by simply texting the lead first. The relationship event has to come from the customer's side (a call in, a form fill, a walk-in), not from the outbound message itself.
This is exactly why a lead audit matters before any reactivation campaign goes out. If you don't know which of your dormant leads fall inside the 2-year window and which don't, you're guessing on every message you send. Running an audit on your CRM first tells you how many leads are safe to text under implied consent, how many need an express opt-in before you touch them, and how many should be excluded entirely.
What do dealers get wrong on opt-outs and quiet hours?
Three things, repeatedly:
- No functioning opt-out. CASL requires an unsubscribe mechanism that works within 10 business days, every time, no exceptions. A generic "reply STOP" that routes to an inbox nobody checks isn't compliance, it's a liability.
- No suppression list enforcement. Once someone opts out, they stay out. Dealers running quarterly campaigns off refreshed exports sometimes re-include opted-out numbers because the suppression list didn't carry over. That's a repeat violation, not a first offense.
- No quiet hours discipline. CASL doesn't set a federal quiet-hours clock the way some provincial telemarketing rules do, but sending commercial texts at 6am or 11pm is a fast way to generate complaints and it undermines the whole point of a reactivation campaign, which is to look like a helpful human, not a scraped list blast.
Any serious reactivation system, automated or not, needs opt-outs and quiet hours honored by default, not as an afterthought bolted on after a compliance complaint.
How is CASL different from TCPA?
TCPA (the US rule) is mostly consent-and-penalty focused: get consent, keep records, respect Do Not Call. CASL is broader and, in some ways, stricter. It covers the message content requirements (sender identification, a working unsubscribe, a physical address), draws a hard line between express and implied consent, and puts a real expiry date on implied consent that TCPA doesn't have in the same form. A dealer group running stores on both sides of the border can't use one compliance playbook for both. What passes under TCPA can still be a CASL violation in Ontario or BC.
What should a GM do before running any SMS campaign on dormant leads?
Start by segmenting the list, not the message. Before writing a single text, sort dormant leads into three buckets: express consent on file, implied consent inside the 2-year window, and everything else. The first two buckets are text-eligible. The third bucket needs an opt-in campaign (email or mail, not SMS) before it becomes text-eligible at all.
This is tedious to do by hand across 21,000 dead leads, which is the average size of a dealer's dormant CRM. It's also exactly the kind of work that should happen automatically, with consent status, last-contact date, and opt-out flags checked before a single message goes out, not after a complaint comes in. That's the operational core of how Revvive works: trigger-based reactivation that checks consent and timing before it ever texts a lead, and honors opt-outs and quiet hours without a human having to remember to enforce them.
If you want the compliance framework laid out step by step, along with the sequencing and message design that gets dormant leads to actually respond, the Dead-Lead Playbook walks through it. And if you're not sure how much of your CRM is even reachable under CASL right now, that's what the audit is for.
One disclaimer, said plainly: this post is not legal advice. CASL enforcement details change and every dealer's data situation is different. Talk to counsel before you launch a campaign, especially on a list you haven't segmented by consent type.
Next step
Pull your CRM export and sort it by last-contact date. Anything inside 2 years with a real inquiry or transaction behind it is a candidate for implied-consent SMS. Anything older needs an opt-in path first. If you want a second set of eyes on that split, book a fit call and we'll walk through it with you, no obligation either way.