The upcoming Canadian Do Not Call List is coming into effect on September 30. Once the site is active you will be able to register your phone number so telemarketers won’t be permitted to phone you. (Note that this is just marketing calls. Organizations with legitimate, non-marketing reasons for calling you can still do so.) Unfortunately the DNCL is full of holes, with hundreds of organizations exempted from the list, including charities, pollsters, political parties, and companies with which you have an existing relationship (banks, telecoms, etc.). Which hardly makes a DNC list worth it at all.
In order to be exempt, however, these organizations agreed to establish internal do-not-call lists. When a person contacts these companies to ask not to get any more calls, they must comply. To make things easier for people, privacy law maven Michael Geist has set up iOptOut.ca. Here you can register your phone numbers and email addresses, and the site will email requests to hundreds of exempted organizations to take you off their marketing lists—much more efficient than contacting all these organizations yourself.
The Canadian Marketing Association and the Canadian Bankers Association pouted and stamped their little feet about this site, trying to argue to the CRTC that they need not honour requests made on behalf of people by a third-party organization. However, the CRTC actually made a good decision for once and decreed that third-party requests are just fine, dandy and valid and if a company doesn’t comply they’ll get whacked with fines.
We’ll see how this all pans out come September 30 (I’m not holding my breath), but could we actually be seeing a decrease in annoying telemarketer calls soon?
Let’s hope so, but I have my doubts about a couple of different solicitation sub-genres. For instance, I have Call Display, and there are taped messages that come in from fake numbers (is 000-000-0000 is now a valid number?). Not only that, but these morons are using equipment that doesn’t disconnect when you hang up on it, but runs through the entire spiel, which is illegal. I don’t think these fly-by-night clods are going to respect these lists.
And then there’s even that kind of thing going on internally. A while back, after a barrage of calls from Bell Canada contractors, I complained differently to Bell, and they stated that I had now been put on an internal do-not-call list, and that if I had ay more calls, I was to immediately demand the contractor’s vendor number and report it to my new contact in Bell’s head office. I’ve had a call since, and learned that if you demand their vendor number, they make a show of trying to find it and then quickly hang up on you. Grrrr.
So, yes, I’m all for the list, but I don’t think the lowest of the parasites are going to be exterminated with this one.
Polls are going to be interesting from now on as more and more people start to opt out. Who’s going to be left for pollsters to call?
I love the way the CMA insists that people really do want to receive these calls and try to paint their actions as a beneficial service. I mean, ideally what we should have is a Do Call List that you use to opt-in to receive telemarketing calls—it’d be a lot simpler and smaller to maintain since only about 6 people will use it!
Give it a try – we’ve had this in the UK for some years now and we found it really helped. We now get almost no calls for double glazing, etc. – it used to be several times a week – the only problem is we’re now starting to get computers calling from India and Florida, which aren’t covered by the UK legislation. It may depend on whether the system is policed in any way; I gather companies here are fined if there are complaints about unsolicited calls.
Funnily enough, here, too, the main phone company was for a while our main source of irritating calls, though they now seem to have switched to irritating e-mails!
BTW, hope Peter’s chickenpox is all sorted now?