Michael Geist says it perfectly:
“The Canadian government passed legislation in 2005 mandating the creation of a do-not-call registry. The registry takes effect on September 30, 2008, yet many Canadians may be disappointed to learn about the exemption of a wide range of organizations (registered charities, business with prior relationships, political parties, survey companies, and newspapers). Under the law, exempted organizations are permitted to make unsolicited telephone calls despite the inclusion of the number in the do-not-call registry. However, organizations must remove numbers from their lists if specifically requested to do so.”
If I were to summarize the types of organizations that I get telemarketing calls from, it would be charities, survey companies, and certainly businesses with which I’ve had a “prior relationship”. The last one is especially egregious in that the threshold of what a “prior relationship” is doesn’t seem to be defined anywhere that I could find. If it means “We got his number from a database that we purchased from a company that he used to do business with”, then what’s the point in having this Do Not Call list?
Thankfully, Michael Geist has created iOptOut. I don’t know how well it will work, but I’ve registered and given it a try.
My wife and I dumped our land line in 2005 and went entirely with cell phones. I was on the national Do Not Call registry, I was paying Verizon for Call Intercept, and yet my phone still rang every 20 minutes all day long with telemarketers. To make it worse, I worked a support job at the time, so I had to listen to phones ringing all day long at work. I didn’t want to deal with that on my time off either. I think my blood pressure went way down after we got rid of the land line.
Emuelle1,
Glad you found a solution! Unfortunately in Canada we don’t have the types of packages that you have in the US in terms of the number of minutes, so it’s not quite yet practical for most people to do that yet. But I do know some people that do that, so it’s definitely on the rise. What I’m curious about is why these companies don’t call mobile phones – obviously, it would tick the person off, but it ticks us off at home – is it fear of the mobile carriers?