Fair Voting BC (FVBC) is committed to safeguarding your privacy and personal information. The following privacy policy outlines the principles and practices we follow in protecting the personal information you provide on our website.

Collecting Personal Information

The purpose of FVBC is to educate, inform and connect with the public about issues relating to our goals of improving democracy and achieving voting reform in British Columbia.  

When you subscribe, donate to us, or take an online action we will ask for certain personal information. We do this to keep in touch with you and provide you with information that may be valuable to you. We may from time to time email, phone or mail you to solicit donations.

We collect, store, and use the personal data relating to any transactions carried out between you and FVBC, such as signing a petition, making a donation, subscribing to our website services, email and/or newsletters; and any other information that you choose to send to us.

We collect information in order to send messages about our work and how to support it, including messages requesting donations, alerting and inviting subscribers to events, and informing them about opportunities to participate in various actions.

Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL)

FVBC complies with CASL and we are committed to making sure you only get the email communications that you want from us. You may stop receiving email at any time by unsubscribing. 

Because we are committed to protecting your privacy and avoiding unwanted email and text messages we have the following policy in place to provide additional clarity to electronic message subscribers. All web forms on FVBC’s websites, social media presences as well as printed materials contain express consent statements about the nature of communications a subscriber will expect to receive by entering their email address into one of our forms or websites and how they can terminate their subscription.

In addition to the above, FVBC always clearly identifies itself as the sender of any of its electronic messages and provides a clear opt out link in the footer of each message.*

* http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/E-1.6/page-2.html#h-6

Website “Cookies”

FVBC’s websites may use “cookies” to help personalize your online experience. They are widely used by most websites to help simplify your experience. The purpose of a cookie is to tell the web server that you have returned to a specific page, so you do not need to re-enter your personal information. By default, most browsers accept cookies, but you have the ability to decline them by adjusting your browser settings.

Data Tracking

In order to better serve our supporters, in addition to collecting the information listed above, we may also use cookies and other tools such as Google Analytics to analyse web activity. These services provide us with statistical data that does not identify any individual. We may also use embedded images in e-mails to track open rates for our mailings, so that we can tell which mailings appeal most to FVBC supporters. We also may collect IP addresses or other data about visits to our website to better understand where our traffic is coming from and how our services are being accessed.

URLs contained in emails may contain an ID that enables us to correctly identify the person who takes an action using a web page. We use these URLs to simplify the process of signing petitions and filling out surveys. We may occasionally present a shortened URL that references a longer URL which contains an ID —we do this to simplify the display, to prevent links from becoming broken when copied, and to ensure compatibility with email programs which do not handle long URLs. When a shortened URL is displayed in an email, you will see the full URL in the browser’s address bar when you access the page.

Use of Information

a) Email Addresses: Email addresses entered on the FVBC website are added to the FVBC email list.  We primarily use these email addresses to provide you with information. You may stop receiving email at any time by unsubscribing using the unsubscribe link at the bottom of all messages sent from FVBC.

FVBC is occasionally offered the opportunity to raise some revenue to support our ongoing activities by allowing another non-profit or charitable organization who believes that our supporters would be generally supportive of those organization’s mission to send emails to our supporters on an occasional basis (e.g., a handful of times per year in total).  We feel that these opportunities represent a reasonable trade-off between furthering our goals by generating some useful revenue and respecting our supporters’ desire to not receive unwanted emails, but if you would prefer not to receive such messages, you can opt out simply by sending an email to president@fairvotingbc.com with “Please do not share my email with other organizations” or similar in the subject or body of your response.

b) Donation information: We do not share or trade donation information with any other entities, other than external contractors who are working with us on fundraising initiatives.

c) Newsletters and Mailings: If you wish to stop receiving our newsletters or mailings, please use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of all messages sent from FVBC.

d) Policy Updates and Changes: Because of the fast-changing nature of the online medium and the world around us, FVBC may change this policy from time to time. Changes may occur without warning and they will be reflected on this page. Please note that FVBC’s Privacy Policy can be superseded by applicable provincial or federal regulation or legislation and in these cases we have no other option but to comply.

e) Links: To provide users with more information on various issues, we often provide links to third-party websites. However, we do not control those websites or necessarily endorse their viewpoints.

f)  Comments: Your privacy is important to us. We welcome comments and questions about our policy. Please contact us via email at president@fairvotingbc.com and use the word ‘Privacy’ in the subject heading.