Well, it looks like Canada is about to get an interesting kick in the business behind from government when it comes to business continuity. What? How could that be, Randall? What does legislation have to do with my ability to continue operations? Good question. You may not like the answer.

The new legislation is considered the most aggressive in any jurisdiction and has some provisions different from any other country on the planet. In the “Fast Facts” section of the new law, coming into effect in July 2014, it will generally prohibit:

sending of commercial electronic messages without the recipient’s consent (permission), including messages to email addresses and social networking accounts, and text messages sent to a cell phone;

Now, this looks really good on paper, until you dig deeper into the legislation. Suppose you have a customer that has installed your amazing banking software in production. Unless you have specific permission to contact your own customer by email, and you have to get it periodically because it expires, you may not be able to send them information about critical updates (fortunately not including mandated PCI security fixes and product safety notices). Out of warranty operational issues are not covered. I’m sure they won’t mind hearing about it, but you still have to get their permission. No problem, right? Well, suppose that you have done a great job and there have been no fixes or bugs or any other communication for two years. Their permission is out of date. You can’t tell them that something is wrong. Not by email anyway. What are you going to do? More importantly, what are they going to do? They get hit by the bug you fixed, but you couldn’t tell them. They are down and you might get sued, or not, depending on where province/state/country your license agreement is governed. Oops.

You cannot even send an email to a prospect asking them for permission to get in touch with them in most cases. If you had doubts about email being dead in Canada, doubt no longer.

The way this could work is to have a mechanism similar to Add Friend buttons in social media. If the legislators had worked with technology companies, this might have worked. It was discussed more than a decade ago. However, this was not done, so we now have gaps between legislation and technology that will result is a fair amount of chaos and damage to the economy.

On the other hand, the entire email spam situation can simply be implemented, without any legislation, if people use White Lists as the only allowable means of email receipt. Using that choice, no one would get spam or any communications whatsoever from anyone new, which appears to be the point of that part of the legislation.

There are a few things you can do, as a customer, to help your supplier operationally:

• Consider “out of warranty warranties”. This would be a provision in your license agreement to have you be notified of all changes as warranty items, even if you are not paying for (or entitled to) warranty service.
• More importantly, if there is any doubt, make sure you contact your vendor periodically to keep implied consent active. Or make your consent explicit.

As a vendor, make sure you have consent on record. Regardless of what may have been said in the press, and there are exceptions, implied consent essentially expires every two years without any other communications. So what you can do:

• Keep in touch with all of your customers. This will keep implied consent alive.
• Get explicit consent.

We’re still researching the proper procedure in dealing with this rather painful situation. Needless to say, we may have to send out some bulk mailings to obtain your permission so that we can let you know the answer, at least if we don’t have one before this law goes into effect.

Unfortunately for the pain and effort that we legitimate companies will have to go to, the legislation is unlikely to make any difference to the nasty spammers out there, who will simply move to a different country and send us spam anyway.

All I can say here is, please keep in touch. Unless you are a spammer, we are not going to have a problem with you sending us email communications or contact requests. You are our valued customers, and will we treat you with the respect you deserve.

As we watch the sun disappear behind the clouds today, we have to consider emergency preparedness and what happens when a rapid thaw occurs after there is a lot of snow.

There are two big questions:

• What does this mean to me; I mean, I’m in an office, right?
• What do I have to do to prepare, since, ok, I get it now?

So what does it mean? Rapid rises in temperature, in the winter anyway, result from weather systems. If you are a weather geek, you’ll know terms like frontal boundaries, occluded fronts, moisture pumps, omega blocks, and this years favourite scary term, “The polar vortex”. Huh? Ok, sudden warm weather means rain and melting. Usually a lot of it. We are currently forecast to get 30mm of rain, but we’re also going to get almost that in melt. So, Randall, that’s only 6cm of water. Who cares? Well, there are a few big problems for you. Let’s start at home.

The most important thing to do when you get home tonight (or now if you are home) is to clear your storm drains. If you don’t, water will simply flood the streets. But 60mm translates to a whole lot more because all that water in your yard has to go somewhere. We’re now up to triple that on the road, and that’s probably above your front-end air dam on your car. But wait, there’s more. The water is also going to flood into the buried power transformers, which do not like getting wet. Oh, and their drains are probably all frozen too. Worse, the salt on your street is going to mix with the water to make a really good conductor, so you need to make sure to avoid going near ground transformers during the storms and until the water drains off.

So the impact at work is, expect power failures and surges. There will be flooding on the roads, so you might want to consider public transit. Do you park in an underground garage? Did you remember to test your UPS batteries?

At home, clean those drains, have candles, and stay away from transformers. Monitor the situation and if you see water pooling up against the side of the house, get out the shovels. In fact, go out now and look for low spots in the snow. And if you’re me, check the UPS batteries at home also. They’ve had quite the workout this season.

You should also monitor the situation as it happens. The Weather Network has published a severe warning here:

http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/intense-system-to-bring-rising-temps-strong-winds-and-heavy-rain-to-southern-ontario/21763/

You can also read my interview with The Richmond Hill Liberal by Kim Zarzour here:

http://www.yorkregion.com/news-story/4374280-warning-clear-drains-for-melting-snow-rain/

Noah’s Flood

What will make things really nasty is the potential for the following: The high snow banks can temporarily keep some of the water in large pools. Eventually, the snow/ice mix will melt and have a catastrophic failure. This means a rapid break, rather like a dam bursting is possible in places. It is absolutely crucial that you and your children stay away from flowing water and avoid being below these dams. Safety first. For example, avoid the Upper Mill Pond park area during and immediately after this event.

For Geeks Only

If you are really interested in doing the math (If your name is Sheldon, for instance, and are reading this), take the ground topography of the area for your volume calculation. Assume a 1:3 road to property ratio, and that the weeping tiles are frozen solid so have no absorption at this time of year so do not factor into capacity. If you want to make things deeper, assume that all snow/ice on roofs, roughly 1:1 with the roads, are going to completely melt off and not pool on the properly, and that these will translate from 15cm snow/ice mix to 5cm of water (it would roughly be 1.5cm of water if it was just snow).  As a SWAG, this results in roughly 200-300cm of water that could pool without proper road drainage. But don’t hold me to these numbers. They are for planning guidance only. The number could be vary by a magnitude either way.

I am  so pleased to have just done an Indestructibility Assessment for the Richmond Hill Chamber of Commerce, who passed with flying colours. It is actually rare that organizations are so well prepared. Some of the things they did right:

• Weathered the recent Ice Storm very nicely. Their operations barely noticed it.
• Have sound backup plans for loss of technical and human resources.
• Replace their UPS batteries on a regular basis.
• Manage their systems very nicely.
• Understand and follow their data retention requirements.
• Plus lots more…

As a member of the Chamber, I am very happy that we are so well represented and glad to be associated with them.