Affiliates running loan offers across Canada tend to treat Quebec as "the same campaign, but in French." It is not. Quebec has its own consumer protection regime, its own licensing requirements, its own interest rate framework, and its own language law that applies even if you are not physically in the province. Get any of these wrong and your traffic either fails to convert, gets your campaigns paused, or in some cases puts you on the wrong side of a regulator.
This is also why Quebec, run correctly, is one of the most profitable provinces an affiliate can work. Less competition, motivated borrowers, and a network of lenders who pay premiums for properly compliant, French-language leads. Here is what you actually need to know.
Quebec has its own consumer protection regime
Every other province regulates lending under its own consumer protection statute, but Quebec's Consumer Protection Act (CPA) is older, stricter, and more prescriptive than most. The body that enforces it is the Office de la protection du consommateur, almost always referred to simply as the OPC.
The key thing for affiliates to understand: a merchant in Quebec needs an OPC permit to offer a loan of money to a consumer. Banks and financial services cooperatives are exempt, but the alternative lenders that buy most affiliate-generated loan leads are not. Lenders without a permit cannot legally collect credit charges on the contract, which means a lead sent to an unpermitted lender is essentially worthless even if it converts on paper.
This has direct implications for where you send Quebec traffic. If your network is routing Quebec leads to lenders without OPC permits, you are sending real applicants into contracts that may not be enforceable, and you are sending them to buyers who cannot legally pay for what they signed up to provide.
The high-cost credit rules work differently in Quebec
Some Canadian provinces that regulate high-cost credit use a fixed APR threshold, typically 32%. Quebec does not. In Quebec, a high-cost credit contract is one where the credit rate exceeds the Bank of Canada Bank Rate plus 22 percentage points. It floats with the central bank.
That floating threshold matters because the same loan can be a "high-cost" product in Quebec but a standard product elsewhere, depending on where rates sit at the time. Merchants offering high-cost credit need a separate OPC permit category, must follow disclosure rules specific to the high-cost designation, and are subject to advertising restrictions that are stricter than those in the rest of Canada.
Layered on top of that is the federal criminal interest rate, which dropped to 35% APR on January 1, 2025. The federal change made offering or advertising a loan above the criminal rate an offence in its own right, not just entering into one. Affiliates promoting Quebec offers need to be confident their lender partners are sitting comfortably below both lines.
French is a legal requirement, not a courtesy
Quebec's Charter of the French Language, strengthened by Bill 96 and brought into force in stages with major deadlines passing in 2024 and 2025, treats French as the default language of commerce in the province. Websites and digital content aimed at Quebec consumers fall squarely within scope.
In practical terms for an affiliate, that means:
- Landing pages targeting Quebec users need a French version. French must be at least as prominent as any other language present.
- Contracts, consent language, privacy policies, and disclosures shown to Quebec applicants need to be available in French.
- Customer-facing communications from the lender, including emails and SMS, need to be in French where the consumer is in Quebec.
The penalties for non-compliance increased substantially. First-offence fines now run up to $30,000, and repeat offences can multiply from there. The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) accepts complaints from the public, which means a competitor or unhappy applicant can trigger an investigation against a business operating outside Quebec just as easily as one inside it.
This is not theoretical. For affiliates, an English-only funnel sending Quebec traffic to an English-only lender is leaking conversions and creating compliance exposure for both sides of the relationship.
CASL still applies, and the consent chain gets longer
Federal CASL rules apply in Quebec the same as everywhere else, but the consent chain has more handoffs because the language requirement adds another layer. Express consent collected in English may not satisfy Quebec's expectation that the consumer was fully informed in their language. Networks that route Quebec leads need to be capturing and preserving consent in French where applicable, and passing that consent record to the lender along with the lead.
If you have not seen our deeper piece on this, our CASL compliance guide for Canadian affiliate marketers covers the basics of express consent and the affiliate consent flow. Quebec adds the language and CPA disclosure requirements on top.
Why this all matters to your payouts
Affiliates who do not understand the Quebec stack do one of three things. They skip Quebec entirely and leave a profitable province on the table. They send Quebec traffic into English-language funnels and watch it convert at a fraction of the rate it should. Or they send it to networks that pass it on to non-compliant lenders, where the leads either fail to fund, get rejected, or generate the kind of complaints that destroy lifetime account value.
Quebec traffic, run properly, behaves differently from the rest of the country. Less affiliate competition pushing CPCs up. Higher intent per application because the funnel filters out the casual clickers who do not engage with French content. And a smaller, tighter set of compliant lenders that pay premium payouts for properly consented, French-language, OPC-eligible applications. The reason Quebec rewards the affiliates who do it right is precisely because most do not.
How we handle Quebec
We run PretsQuebec.ca as a dedicated property for Quebec traffic. The funnel is built in French from the ground up, with consent language, disclosures, and applicant communications that meet the CPA and Bill 96 requirements. Quebec leads are routed only to lenders we have verified hold the appropriate OPC permits, including the high-cost credit category where applicable.
On the privacy side, our Quebec funnel is built to Law 25 standards. Consent is explicit and granular, tracking technologies are gated behind opt-in, automated decisioning is disclosed where applicable, and our data handling between the network and downstream lenders is documented and assessed. Applicants can exercise their access, portability, and deletion rights through us, and we have systems to handle those requests.
For affiliates, that means you can send Quebec traffic through our network without having to build a separate French funnel, vet lender permits yourself, run your own privacy impact assessments, or worry about the consent and disclosure chain. The infrastructure is already there, the lender pool is already qualified, and the same lead quality standards that apply to the rest of our network apply in Quebec, just on top of a Quebec-specific compliance layer that most networks do not have.
Is affiliate marketing in Quebec worth it?
Quebec is not a translation problem. It is a market with its own regulator, its own licensing framework, its own definition of high-cost credit, and a language law with real penalties attached. The affiliates who win in Quebec are the ones who either build all of that infrastructure themselves or partner with a network that already has. If you are leaving Quebec traffic on the table or sending it into the wrong funnel, you are leaving payouts on the table too.