Question Period Note: TELECOMMUNICATIONS HIGH PRESSURE SALES

What is the government doing to help Canadians who are dissatisfied with the customer service of their telecommunications service provider?

• No Canadian should have to fear being misled or be treated unfairly by a telecom company.
• The Government of Canada directed the CRTC to conduct a public inquiry on this because we share their concerns about these tactics.
• In response to the evidence of misleading sales practices, other measures are being implemented such as a secret shopper program and an Internet Code of Conduct.
• We thank the CRTC for work already underway and look forward to concrete solutions being put in place that will benefit Canadian consumers.

Release of the CRTC report on aggressive and misleading sales practices

In June 2018, following significant public reports of inappropriate sales practices by telecommunication companies, the Government directed the CRTC to investigate and report on these sales practices.

On February 20, 2019, the CRTC released its report. The Commission confirmed that
inappropriate sales practices were taking place. They exist in all types of sales channels, including in store, online, over the telephone, and door to door. They occur to an unacceptable degree; they are harming consumers, in particular vulnerable Canadians, and are a serious concern for the CRTC.

The CRTC also noted that some of the internal measures that telecommunications companies have implemented have not been effectively put in place and in terms of public rules there are many overlapping consumer protections – implemented at different jurisdictional levels. This can create confusion regarding consumer rights, and make any attempt to obtain assistance expensive and time consuming.

The CRTC outlines a range of measures to help address these issues. Some are already underway or commencing soon, others will likely require further regulatory processes or information gathering to implement. In the nearer term, the CRTC has an Internet Code of Conduct that was under development and slated to come into effect in January 2020, is launching a secret shopper program to monitor behavior in the marketplace, and will also be creating information tools to help consumers better understand their rights and avenues for recourse.

There is an ambitious agenda for future action but will require multiple regulatory processes to consider and implement. They include requiring service providers to provide a clear pre-sales quotes in a defined format, requiring trial periods to allow customers to cancel a service that did not match what they were offered, and expanding the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services’ (CCTS) mandate to include handling complaints of misleading or aggressive retail sales practices.

More broadly, the CRTC outlined practices that individual carriers should strongly consider undertaking as best practices such as providing transcripts or recordings of sales calls to consumers and implementing a “do not nock list” to govern door-to-door sales. The CRTC will be monitoring the industry’s response to the report.

CCTS Annual Report 2018-2019

The CCTS produces an annual report on the complaints that it receives during each fiscal year. On November 28, 2019, the CCTS published its 2018-19 Annual Report. The CCTS accepted 19,287 complaints between August 1, 2018 and July 31, 2019, a 35% increase relative to the previous year. The rate of increase of the number of complaints is lower than in 2017-18, where the number of complaints increased by 56% from the previous year. The CCTS Commissioner has made statements that likely the single largest driver of the complaints increase is greater awareness of the CCTS and its complaint resolution process. Other factors may include growing complexity of services and growing number subscriptions and Canadians using telecom services.

Internet Code of Conduct

The Internet Code is slated to come into effect on January 31, 2020 and will provide Canadians with additional help to resolve disputes with their Internet Service Provider (ISP). The Internet Code mandates that ISPs provide consumers with easier-to-understand contracts, clearer information about prices, bill shock protection and greater flexibility for consumers to cancel their internet service contracts. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) conducted a proceeding to establish a mandatory code of conduct to address consumer contracts for retail Internet access services provided by large Internet service providers (e.g. Bell and TELUS). Some stakeholders raised the need for such a code during the proceeding on aggressive and misleading sales.

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