1. Why we publish this policy
All Canada is a reader-supported editorial site. Display advertising and a small number of affiliate partnerships pay for the writers, fact-checkers, designers and photographers who produce the guides on this website. Without that revenue, the site would not exist in the form you are reading. At the same time, advertising is the single biggest source of pressure on editorial independence in any commercial publication on the open web. This policy exists so that the rules we operate under are visible, specific and easy to hold us to.
The principles below apply to every page on the allcanada.ca domain, every guide we publish, every email newsletter we send (if and when we send them), and every social channel operated by the publication.
2. Forms of advertising we use
There are four advertising-adjacent activities that may produce revenue for All Canada. We disclose them all here so the reader can recognise them on the page.
2.1 Programmatic display advertising
The majority of our revenue comes from Google AdSense and, on a smaller scale, other programmatic ad exchanges. Google's system reads the page, considers the visitor's browser signals (with the privacy controls described in our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy), and serves an ad it believes is relevant. We do not pre-approve individual creatives; Google's policy framework filters categories we have asked it to block. Display ads are visually separated from editorial content, are labelled by Google as "Ads", and never share the typography, colour or layout treatment of our editorial copy.
2.2 Affiliate links
A small number of links, principally on the Shop Canada page and within travel logistics paragraphs on our province and city guides, are affiliate links to retailers such as Amazon.ca and selected tour-booking platforms. If a reader clicks such a link and completes a purchase, the retailer pays us a commission. The price the reader pays is identical to the price they would pay without the link. Affiliate links are chosen for editorial reasons first and we do not insert affiliate links into recommendations the editorial team would not otherwise make.
2.3 Direct sponsorships and sponsored content
To date, All Canada has not run sponsored content. If we do in the future, the post will be labelled with the word "Sponsored" at the top of the page in the same size and weight as our headline; excluded from our editorial categories; excluded from inclusion in our sitemap as editorial content; identified in the URL with a path beginning /sponsored/; and written either by the sponsor (with our edits for accuracy and house style) or by an editorial team member working from sponsor-supplied facts.
2.4 Tourism-board hosted travel
Writers occasionally accept media-rate or complimentary travel from tourism boards, hotels, restaurants and tour operators to make destination reporting possible. Accepting hosted travel does not obligate the writer to write favourably. Articles produced from hosted travel carry a one-line disclosure at the bottom of the page identifying the supporting organisation and confirming that they had no editorial input or approval of the published piece.
3. What we will not accept
Some advertising opportunities are off limits regardless of the price offered. We refuse pay-for-placement in editorial lists. Businesses cannot buy their way onto a Who's Who page, into a province guide's where-to-eat section, or onto our cities list. We refuse negative-coverage removal: no business can pay us to remove or soften a critical mention. We refuse backlink schemes: we do not sell links from editorial content. We refuse cloaked or undisclosed affiliate content. We refuse categories incompatible with a general-audience travel and education site: adult content, gambling, payday lending, ICO and crypto-speculation, weapons, recreational tobacco and vaping, alcohol marketed to minors, and political advertising targeting Canadian federal or provincial elections. We refuse misleading creative such as ads designed to imitate site navigation, prize-notification banners, fake system warnings, and ads that trigger downloads on click.
4. Separation of advertising and editorial
Editorial decisions on All Canada are made by editors who do not see advertising revenue per page and have no information about which advertisers are buying inventory on the site. Advertisers cannot review articles before publication. Advertisers cannot suggest changes to articles after publication except through the same correction channel available to any reader (a factual error supported by evidence). Editors are paid a flat fee per published, fact-checked piece and have no bonus tied to the popularity or ad performance of an article. When an advertiser is the subject of an editorial piece, the editor handling that piece is informed in writing of the relationship, and the page's coverage of the advertiser is reviewed for tone by a second editor before publication.
5. How ad targeting and personalisation work
Most of the ads you see on All Canada are served by Google AdSense. Google uses a combination of contextual signals (the topic of the page you are reading), browser and device signals (the broad category of device, language settings, country-level location), and cookies and similar identifiers where you have consented. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, or another jurisdiction with consent requirements, our consent management platform will ask whether you accept personalised advertising before any non-essential cookies are set. You can withdraw consent at any time using the cookie-preference link in our footer, and you can opt out of personalised Google ads at adssettings.google.com.
6. Ad placement standards
On every page we cap the number of display units, separate ad blocks from running text with whitespace and a thin rule, and avoid placements that could be confused with editorial content. We do not use pop-ups that obscure content, interstitial ads that block reading, auto-playing video with sound, or ads that shift the page layout after the reader begins scrolling. On mobile we limit to one anchor unit and a small number of in-feed units to keep the experience navigable on slower connections in rural Canada.
7. Buying advertising on All Canada
Direct ad sales are handled through [email protected]. We will respond to legitimate inquiries within five business days with a rate card, audience information and creative specifications. Direct buyers go through the same vetting as programmatic inventory and the same prohibited categories apply. Tourism boards, post-secondary institutions, museums, festivals and Canadian small businesses receive a 25 percent discount on our published rates. Indigenous-owned businesses receive a 35 percent discount.
8. Reporting an advertising problem
If you see an ad on All Canada that looks like a virus alert or prize notification, auto-plays sound, downloads a file when clicked, or appears to violate one of the policies listed in section 3, please email [email protected] with the page URL and, if possible, a screenshot. We will investigate, file a complaint with the ad network if appropriate, and apply a block to that creative on the site.
9. Reader data and advertising
All Canada does not sell reader data and does not maintain a marketing database that is shared with third parties. The data collected via Google AdSense and our analytics provider is used to operate the site and choose ads, and is governed by the providers' own policies as outlined in the Privacy Policy. We do not use lookalike audiences, custom segments or first-party data uploads for ad targeting.
10. Updates to this policy
This policy is reviewed at least once a year and whenever a material change occurs. The date at the top of this page reflects the most recent review. Substantive change log: 15 May 2026 — Expanded sections on tourism-board hosted travel, ad placement standards, and direct ad sales process. Added explicit list of refused categories and discounts for Canadian small business, post-secondary, tourism and Indigenous-owned advertisers. 1 September 2024 — Original policy published with launch of the website.
11. Contact
Questions about advertising, affiliate links, sponsored content, or how this policy is applied to a specific page may be sent to [email protected] or via the contact page. Editorial corrections unrelated to advertising should be sent to the same address using the subject line "Correction" so they are routed to the editor on duty.