I appreciate Alec Saunders bringing further attention to my travels on Tuesday. Many people are unaware of how broadly it is defined. The CRTC says that Telemarketing is:
[T]he use of telecommunications facilities to make unsolicited calls for the purpose of solicitation where solicitation is defined as the selling or promoting of a product or service, or the soliciting of money or money’s worth, whether directly or indirectly and whether on behalf of another party. This includes solicitation of donations by or on behalf of charitable organizations.
Unfortunately, this definition means that when your school PTA, or kids’ hockey team, or scout troop calls you to tell you about their upcoming car wash, cookie sales, school play – these are ‘telemarketing’. If you want those calls banned, then you are more of a scrooge than Dickens could conjure.
When the seniors’ Golden Age club wants to notify their members about an outing to Stratford, that is telemarketing. Same as inviting them to Bingo next Thursday. Go ahead and think that, in your fantasy land, you can change the way that 80-year-olds communicate and you can get them to use viral marketing and Web 2.0 tools. Who is going to buy them their computers, pay for their training or tell them that the world has passed them by? Not me.
I’d like to be a little more practical and let people choose the communications tools they want to use and make sure that the regulatory framework is more permissive.
Let’s try to remember that the vast majority of telemarketing calls are positive experiences for three stakeholders: the caller, the recipient and the telecom carriers that provide the facilities and transport for the sector. It is your insurance agent calling you to tell you about new options for your home insurance renewal, your bank, your alumni association, your church, your ski club, your car dealer booking your next oil change. It even includes your kids calling grandma and their aunts and uncles to sponsor them in the school walk-a-thon.
By the way, unless your grade 3 class happens to have a registered tax number, Parliament didn’t grant them an exemption from having to first check the national do not call list. And even if they do have such a tax department break, if you read the phone companies submissions, they would have wanted you to first reprogram your home phone line to display ‘Riverdale School Walkathon’ before your kid started calling for sponsors, or selling gift wrap and chocolates.
With government cutbacks, it is the charitable and non-profit sector that supplements an ever-shrinking social safety net that we, as Canadian, cherish as a defining characteristic of our national moral fabric. Let’s not impose restrictions that unreasonably prevent charitable organizations from doing their job.
That is why I went to Ottawa on Tuesday. The transcripts will soon be posted. Let me know your thoughts.
Update: [May 4, 2006]
The transcripts are now available.