Terms of Use

These terms govern the Carter website and the two research connectors it describes, Carter Customs and Carter Tax & Law. Using the site or the connectors means you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.

1. What the service is

Carter is a documentary information service on the federal customs law and federal tax law of Canada. It maintains a corpus of official public sources — among them the Customs Tariff and its vintages, the federal customs Acts including the Customs Act and SIMA, the Income Tax Act and the other federal tax Acts, CRA folios, advance rulings, tax treaties, D-memoranda and case law — and serves them to Claude or ChatGPT so they can be read and cited in your conversation.

What the service returns is documentary: texts, dates, citations and readings of the record. It renders no decision, determination or position of any authority.

2. Not professional advice

The service is a research aid for professionals, not a professional. Nothing it returns is legal, tax, customs or accounting advice, and no lawyer-client, accountant-client or broker-client relationship is created by using it.

Any drafted output — a return, a correction, a notice of objection, a notice of appeal, a memorandum, a letter — ships as a draft, for review by a qualified professional; on the customs side, the importer and its licensed broker keep the duty of reasonable care. Verify every citation against the official publication before relying on it.

3. Use within Claude and ChatGPT

The connectors operate inside Claude — claude.ai, Claude Desktop, the mobile apps — and inside ChatGPT the same way. Your use of Claude or ChatGPT is governed by Anthropic’s or OpenAI’s own terms and policies, which are separate from these terms and are not the publisher’s responsibility. Carter is an independent service: it is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Anthropic or OpenAI, and it is not a government service.

4. Subscription and access

The service is offered on a subscription basis (a professional plan), with a free trial. During the launch period, access is open while billing is being finalized: adding the connector currently requires no payment and no access key beyond the sign-in that protects access. Pricing terms will be published on this site before billing is introduced. The publisher may modify, suspend or discontinue all or part of the service at any time, and updates the record as the underlying sources evolve; there is no commitment to permanent availability.

5. Acceptable use

Use the service lawfully and reasonably. In particular, do not:

• attempt to disrupt, overload, probe or gain unauthorized access to the service;
• misrepresent output of the service as an official determination, ruling or publication of any agency or court;
• use the service in violation of applicable law or of the rights of others.

6. The record and its limits

The record is compiled with care from official public sources and served “as is” and “as available”. The publisher does not warrant that it is complete, current, uninterrupted or free of errors, and does not warrant any outcome from its use. Only official publications are authoritative — the Acts, the Canada Gazette, the agencies, the courts and, for Québec, the official publisher; where the record and an official publication disagree, the official publication prevails. Because federal law is enacted in both languages, both versions are equally authoritative; divergences are resolved by the shared-meaning rule (R. v. Daoust, 2004 SCC 6). Québec texts are reproduced with attribution and a notice of non-official status.

7. Your responsibility

You remain solely responsible for anything you declare, produce, sign or file — returns, corrections, objections, appeals, elections and all other filings — and for the decisions you take. You are responsible for the accuracy of the facts and dates you supply in your questions, and for professional review of any draft before use.

8. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, the publisher is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, penalties, interest or assessments, arising out of or in connection with the use of, or inability to use, the service. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the greatest extent the law allows. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

9. Intellectual property

The Acts, regulations, rulings and judgments served by the record are official publications. Federal law is reproduced under the Reproduction of Federal Law Order (SI/97-5), with a notice that the reproduction is not official; Québec texts are reproduced with attribution and a notice of non-official status. The site’s design, wordmark, compilation, arrangement and original text belong to the publisher. Claude and Anthropic are trademarks of Anthropic, PBC; ChatGPT and OpenAI, of OpenAI, Inc.; other names and marks cited on this site belong to their respective owners and are used to describe sources and compatibility, not affiliation.

10. Changes to these terms

These terms may be revised as the service evolves. The date at the top of this page identifies the version in force; continued use of the service after a revision is acceptance of the revised terms.

Publisher identification: see the Legal Notice. Data handling: see the Privacy Policy.