Important notices
Privacy statement

Investissement Québec ("we", "our") makes every effort to protect the privacy of your personal information. Given that we obtain information on you through our website (investquebec.com) or from the forms that you return to us by fax or mail, we feel it is important that you understand the manner in which we gather and use this information. This document also contains additional information that we are required to provide under the European Union’s regulation No. 2016/679 of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, also known as the general data protection regulation (the “GDPR”), in our capacity as controller thereunder, to the extent it is applicable.

Information Required for the Opening of an Account or Subscription

Cookies

Use of Information

Information that we Share With Third Parties

Security and Access

Rights

Information Required for the Opening of an Account or Subscription

In order to sign you up for our newsletters, you will need to submit your name, title, telephone number, country/province and e-mail address.

We may require additional information at a later date.

Cookies

We use a feature in your browser, known as cookies, to recognize your computer. A cookie is a small data file that is copied onto your hard drive when you visit a website. Cookies may be persistent cookies (they remain on a device between browsing sessions for a maximum time period) or session cookies (they are deleted at the end of the browser session). Cookies may be first-party cookies (they are set by the web server of the visited page and share the same domain) or third-party cookies (they are stored by a domain other than the visited page's domain, which can happen when the webpage references a file, such as JavaScript, located outside its domain).

We do not and cannot use cookies to retrieve personal information from your computer. The table below explains the cookies we use and why.

We may use cookies that are strictly necessary to operate our website without users’ consent, including:

• user-input cookies (session-id) such as first-party cookies to keep track of the user's input when filling out online forms, etc. for the duration of a session or persistent cookies limited to a few hours in some cases;
• authentication cookies, to identify the user once they have logged in, for the duration of a session;
• user-centric security cookies, used to detect authentication abuses, for a limited persistent duration;
• multimedia content player cookies, used to store technical data to play back video or audio content, for the duration of a session;
• user-interface customization cookies such as language or font preferences, for the duration of a session (or slightly longer);
• third-party social plug-in content-sharing cookies, for logged-in members of a social network.

We use performance cookies enabling us to tell how users use our website. For instance, the information gathered is used for statistical purposes, in particular to determine the number of hits on the site and to pinpoint the most frequently visited pages. These cookies include the following:

Performance Cookies

We may also use marketing cookies enabling us to decide which services and offers may be relevant for a user and thus tailor the ads a user sees on our and others’ websites and apps, such as:

Marketing Cookies

You can refuse to consent to non-strictly necessary cookies by using the cookie control panel of this website, changing your browser settings or permanently using a browser plugin. If your browser is configured to alert you before accepting cookies, you will receive a warning message for each cookie. You can change your browser settings in order to disable cookies.

Use of Information

This section sets out the different uses (or purposes) for the processing of your personal data as well as their legal basis under the GDPR, to the extent applicable.

As indicated above, the information provided is used to process your application and to open your user account. This is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests, namely identifying the representative or key person of the legal entity to whom we propose and/or for whom we perform services.

We also use all the information you provide us to make your visit on our website more pleasant and to ensure that content from our site is presented effectively. We may also use this information in the future to add personalized items to our site or to third parties’ sites or to ensure that our content reflects the interests of our users.

In addition, we may use your personal information to send you information letters or promotional offers with a view to providing you with the best possible service. This is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests, namely improving our website and marketing our services, as well as your consent to the collection of information from your terminal equipment.

We may use the information to improve our offerings and customer relations, i.e. for direct marketing operations, for example.

We may use your information for the production of statistical information, which is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests of gaining insight into our market.

We may also use it to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations and any judicial order or judiciary rule of procedure court , for the purposes of complying with a statutory obligation or our legitimate interests of defending our rights.

We do not share your personal information with third parties except as indicated below.

Information that we Share with Third Parties

We may share your information with the following categories of recipients of personal data:

• Entities, governmental organizations and industrial clusters that may provide financial assistance to your business;
• Third party service providers including online marketing agencies (as well as their own service providers);
• If required by law or an order, our external auditors, our shareholders, and government authorities such as the Autorité des marchés financiers and Canada Revenue Agency.

On October 7, 2009, Investissement Québec and Revenu Québec signed an agreement entitled "Entente portant sur l'échange de renseignements nécessaires à l'administration de mesures fiscales ou à l'application d'une loi fiscale" [agreement on the exchange of information required for the administration of fiscal measures or the enforcement of a tax statute]. Under that agreement, the two organizations can share information required for the exercise of their respective mandates without being obliged to ask for the consent of the individual in question. We disclose information to Revenu Québec solely within the framework of this agreement, which has been approved by the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec. In addition to analyzing the nature of the information provided and the reasons for which it is disclosed, the Commission's responsibilities include ensuring that appropriate security measures and measures to ensure confidentiality are put in place.

Under no circumstances do we transmit your personal information to other third parties or organizations without your consent.

For the purposes of the GDPR, we wish to inform you that personal data may be transferred outside the European Economic Area (which includes the European Union) to Canada, the U.S.A. U.S., as well as other countries where our service providers or their own service providers are located. An adequacy decision from the European Commission pursuant to Directive 95/46/EC avails under article 45 of the GDPR in the case of transfers to private-sector organizations in Canada governed by the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, organizations in the U.S. that are Privacy Shield accredited as well as organizations in Andorra, Argentina, the Faroe Islands, Guernsey, Israel, the Isle of Man, Japan, Jersey, New Zealand, Switzerland and Uruguay. In other cases, appropriate safeguards are in place to protect personal information protected by the GDPR in accordance with article 46 of the GDPR – namely standard contractual clauses as approved by the European Commission. Data subjects can obtain a copy of any standard contractual clauses in place which relate to transfers of their personal information by contacting us.

Security and Access

We store your files ourselves. We also take all appropriate security measures to ensure that the information you provide is kept confidential. Please read our security measures for additional information.

Rights

You can consult, modify or ask us to delete all the personal information you have provided us at any time. To do so, simply send us an e-mail at sai@invest-quebec.com, or write to us at:

Investissement Québec

Reception and Information Service

413, rue Saint-Jacques, bureau 500

Montréal (Québec) H2Y 1N9

If you are in the European Economic Area and your personal data is processed by us in relation to the offering of goods or services to them or the monitoring of your behaviour, you are advised that you have the following rights under the GDPR, which may be exercised by contacting us. We will respond within a month unless the request is particularly complex:

• the right to object to the processing of personal data based on our legitimate interests, in the absence of compelling grounds for continuing such processing;
• the right to access one’s personal data;
• the right to correct any mistakes in one’s personal data;
• the right to restrict processing of personal data in limited circumstances;
• the right to data portability of personal data in limited circumstances;
• the right to withdraw one’s consent to the processing of personal data when consent is the sole legal basis of such processing;
• the right to erasure in limited circumstances;
• the right to lodge a complaint with a competent supervisory authority in Europe.

Last update: April 2019