Have you ever complained to Canada’s Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS)? Canadians are expected to complain to this organization about their home telephone service, cell phone service, cable, satellite, television or radio programming, Internet service, all things that create the fabric of our modern society. If you have complained, have you ever wondered afterwards why you did? You blush to admit that you could have been so gullible. It appears that something like 99 per cent of the people who complain to this body are told that the complaint is outside the CCTS’ scope. Word of mouth says, “Don’t waste your time.”
It is embarrassing for Canadians and triply embarrassing for the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) that we have let our telecommunications companies make such a mockery of customer service. Decency, fairness, consideration, empathy, respect, caring, humanity, kindness, regard, honesty, concern for our fellows are not words that are part of the modern telecom’s language. Canada’s telecoms and their customers are in an abusive relationship.
Much of the fault for this sorry state of affairs rests with the CRTC. This craven agency of an uncaring and ideologically consumed government has committed this act against the citizens they are supposed to represent and protect. They ignore the problems we face with telecoms in the guise of deregulation. That is their mantra: It seems, they claim, that unregulated companies care about their customers while that truth is today that nobody gives a damn—regulated or unregulated.
But somebody has to give a damn. The joke used to be in days gone by that the regulator (the CRTC) and the telecoms spent so much time across the table from each other that they began to think alike. They are so much of a like mind that they finish each others’ jokes. Never was this more evident than in the hearings last fall on having cable and satellite companies paying broadcasters for local signals.
The first half of the hearings was the heavy-weight event. It was broadcasters versus cable and satellite companies. Everyone was on their game. The broadcasters were wily and smirking—buddy-buddy with their pals, the commissioners. The cable and satellite people were wary and erudite—buddy-buddy with same commissioners.
It was obvious as the hearings progressed that the commissioners were feeling squeezed between their influential buddies and were trying to push the service delivery companies into a negotiation with the program creation companies to set a price for local signals. What was left unsaid was that the cable and satellite companies would just pass on the cost to their customers and no commissioner would care—except one commissioner, a gentleman from Quebec, who noted that basic cable and satellite costs were too high and he wanted the companies to consider what he called a “skinny basic” cost structure for cable and satellite service.
He had little trouble selling his proposition to the individual consumers who represented more than 20,000 Canadians who had asked to intercede on behalf of either the cable/satellite companies or the broadcasters and even a few who thought about the issues and brought some original thinking to the deliberations.
But the consumers were wasting their time. It was like a mask had dropped over the chairman’s and most of the commissioners’ faces when the consumers started to appear. Sitting in the commission’s tiny Toronto office, crammed between other consumer supplicants and facing a web camera, the only view on the television screen was the bored commissioners at their head office, paying attention to everything else but the speakers. The only recommendation to them, that made sense at the time, was to suggest they resign. They were hardly doing any good for Canadians.
An addendum to that is the CRTC recently looked into the complaints process at CCTS. According to Michael Geist of the Toronto Star, Bell Canada argued before the CRTC that CCTS is not needed. The point Bell was trying to make was that competition encourages better customer service. Geist reported that Bell believed it was in the interests of all the telecom companies to provide “high-quality customer service and complaints resolution.” One wonders when that miracle might happen.
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