Legal Research

CRTC Tries Compliance with Violating Telemarketers

By Simon Fodden

Last week the CRTC announced that in two cases it has issued notices of violation with fines to two telemarketers who called numbers on the “do not call” list. These are the first two such notices since the DNC list became effective, on June 30, 2006, pursuant to CRTC “unsolicited telecommunications rules.”

The CRTC released no information about the identities of the telemarketers or the size of the fines proposed in the notices.

This reluctance concerning publicity is in line with stated CRTC policy, according to which enforcement of the rules proceeds in stages, the first of which is “facilitation to encourage compliance. The last stage of “facilitation” before going to full on enforcement is “Publishing the nature of the violation, the name of the telemarketer that committed the violation, and the amount of the penalty on the CRTC’s website.”

Imposing a monetary penalty with no publicity indicates that a warning letter and compliance meetings have failed to produce compliance, a fact that Leonard Katz, CRTC’s vice-chair of telecommunications confirmed in an interview. Katz also said in the interview that some 700 telemarketers are currently under investigation.

[via E-Tips]

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on July 15, 2009 (boomark / email).