A fine of $10 million tends to make you sit up and pay attention.

That’s the maximum penalty for non-compliance with new regulations that will take effect July 1, 2014—less than a month away—impacting all commercial electronic messages (CEM) sent to Canadian businesses and individuals.

The new regulations are outlined in Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL), which was originally legislated back in 2010. I’ve been following this story closely for the past month and tweeting about it to my followers. Frankly, I am surprised there haven’t been more articles about it in the U.S. travel trade press, considering the fact that cruise lines, tour operators and travel agents rely so heavily on electronic databases of customers and prospects to market their programs.

U.S. and other non-Canada-based companies aren’t exempt from the new law, and if their databases look anything like the ones I’ve helped build at travel companies over the past several decades, there are plenty of Canadian addresses in those customer and prospect files.