Get tougher on telcos
Canadians used to being put on hold by their telecommunications providers have reason to be even more frustrated this week after the federal regulator effectively hung up on them.
After an eight-month inquiry by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, consumers may have hoped for some relief from the misleading and aggressive sales tactics the telcos employ.
Instead, a 39-page report released by the CRTC names no names, so customers can’t avoid the worst offenders, and offers only vague recommendations for followup that may or may not happen down the road. That isn’t good enough. But perhaps it’s all that should be expected from a regulator that wasn’t even interested in investigating what one critic termed “inhumane” sales tactics until it was ordered to do so by Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains.
Now that it has done so, the chair of the CRTC has happily passed on its responsibility to stop the plague of bad business practices to the very companies that it found were misleading, bullying and taking financial advantage of consumers.
The “onus” is on them, said Ian Scott, acknowledging there may be “some impatience and frustration” with the CRTC’s lack of action on issues that anyone with a phone, television or internet connection faces.
These are, after all, the same companies the report says target their most vulnerable customers — the elderly and disabled as well as those whose first language is not French or English — for services they don’t need or even want.
Indeed, Scott highlighted the case of an elderly man who was sold two high-speed internet packages when he didn’t even have a home computer.
In the absence of concrete action from the CRTC, one would hope the federal government would have stepped in with a plan of its own.
But Bains also punted the issue, offering no plan to address the concerns the report raises.
He could have talked about creating a business environment where a fourth national telecom provider could survive to provide more competition. Or he could have discussed ways to penalize bad actors. Or, heaven forbid, he could force the CRTC to name the most egregious players so consumers can steer clear of them. But he did not.
That means it’s back to bad business as usual. And that’s unacceptable.