1. Scope
This policy covers personal information collected by St. Joseph's Centre of Hope for Women (“the Centre”, “we”) through sjcentre.ca, our forms, our donation pages, and related email and phone contact. We follow Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and applicable Ontario law.
2. What we collect
Only what you choose to give us, plus basic technical data:
- Contact details — name, email, phone, and city or postal code where you provide it.
- Your message — what you write in a contact, appointment, counselling, or prayer request form.
- Donation details — amount, frequency, date, and whether the gift is one-time or monthly.
- Communication history — our replies, appointment notes, and emails you have opened, kept in our donor and contact management system.
- Technical data — IP address, browser type, pages visited, and referring page, collected automatically by our host and analytics.
We do not collect information from third-party data brokers, and we do not build profiles from social media.
3. Why we collect it
To respond to your request, arrange support or an appointment, process a donation and issue your tax receipt, keep required financial records, send updates you asked for, and understand in aggregate how the site is used so we can improve it. We do not use your information for any unrelated purpose without asking you first.
4. Sensitive & counselling information
Information about a pregnancy, a crisis, your family, or your faith is treated as confidential. Access is limited to the staff and trained volunteers directly involved in your care, and it is never used in fundraising material, newsletters, or on this website unless you give us specific, written permission — which you may withdraw at any time.
There are narrow exceptions where the law requires disclosure: a credible risk of serious harm to you or someone else, a duty to report suspected child abuse or neglect, or a valid court order. We will tell you when we can.
5. Payment information
Card payments are handled entirely by our PCI-DSS compliant payment processor on an encrypted connection. The Centre never receives, sees, or stores your full card number, expiry date, or security code. What we retain is the amount, date, payment method type, and last four digits, so we can match a gift to a receipt and answer questions about it.
6. Consent
Submitting a form or making a donation is your consent to the uses described here. Consent for marketing email is separate and always opt-in. You may withdraw consent at any time, subject to records we are legally required to keep (for example, receipted donations).
7. Who we share information with
We never sell, rent, trade, or exchange donor or client lists. We share only with service providers who need the information to do their job for us, under confidentiality obligations: our payment processor, our donor and contact management platform, our email delivery provider, our website host, and our accountants and auditors. We may also disclose information where required by law.
8. How long we keep it
Donation and receipt records are kept for seven years, as Canada Revenue Agency rules require. Contact and enquiry records are kept while the relationship is active and for up to three years afterwards. Counselling records are kept only as long as needed for continuity of care, then securely destroyed. Aggregate, anonymised statistics may be kept indefinitely.
9. How we protect it
The site is served over HTTPS. Access to our donor system is limited by role, protected by strong passwords and two-factor authentication, and reviewed when staff or volunteers change. Paper records are stored locked. No system is perfectly secure, but we take these safeguards seriously and review them regularly.
10. Cookies & analytics
We use a small number of cookies: essential ones that make the site and donation forms work, and analytics cookies that tell us in aggregate which pages are visited. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings; essential cookies are needed for donation forms to function.
11. Email & unsubscribing
We send email in line with Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL). Every newsletter and appeal includes a one-click unsubscribe, and we act on it immediately. Transactional messages — receipts, appointment confirmations, and replies to your questions — are sent regardless, because you asked for them.
12. Your rights
You may ask us to show you the personal information we hold about you, correct anything inaccurate, delete your record where we are not legally required to keep it, stop contacting you, or tell you who we have shared it with. Email help@sjcentre.ca and we will respond within 30 days at no charge. We may ask you to confirm your identity first.
13. Young people
This website is not directed at children. We will, of course, help a young person who reaches out to us in a crisis pregnancy, and we handle their information with particular care and in line with our legal obligations. We do not knowingly accept donations from anyone under 18.
14. Information stored outside Canada
Some of our providers store or process data in the United States or elsewhere. While there, information may be accessible to foreign courts and law-enforcement agencies under the laws of that country. We choose providers with recognised security and privacy commitments, and we ask them to protect your information to a standard comparable to ours.
15. If something goes wrong
If a breach of security safeguards creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will notify you and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada as soon as feasible, tell you plainly what happened, and explain the steps we are taking and what you can do.
16. Contact & complaints
Our Privacy Officer answers all privacy questions and requests: help@sjcentre.ca or 416-672-0144. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at priv.gc.ca or 1-800-282-1376.
See also our Terms & Conditions, which cover donations, receipts, and use of this website.