Canada Implements 'Do Not Call' Registry For Telemarketers

Buy an ad on DigitalJournal.com

Canada's broadcast regulator, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission is the agency who is responsible for overseeing the national Do Not Call List (DNCL).

As of today, you can register your residential, wireless, fax or VOIP phone number on the DNCL and stop those annoying telemarketers from being able to call you. Registration on the DNCL list lasts for 3 years and becomes effective 31 days after signing up.

The CRTC reported that as of 1:30 p.m. today, more than 223,000 people had register their numbers on the DNCL either online and telephone. Denis Carmel, from the CRTC is quoted as saying:

It's way beyond anything we'd expected. ... On the telephone side, more than one million people tried to access the system. It's clearly over any estimation we had done. ... We'd no idea that it would be so successful on initial phase.

If you want to register your phone number on the DNCL, you can go to www.LNNTE-DNCL.gc.ca or you can call 1-866-580-3625. A local all news radio station, 680News, was reporting over the lunch hour that the on-line system had crashed and that calls to the phone number were not being answered. I personally registered my numbers this morning and although I did receive a message "The service is not available. Please try again later.", i kept at it and eventually, got the numbers registered.

Once your number is on the list, telemarketers are then banned from calling you and if they actually do call you, they could face fines of up to $15,000.

Now, of course, some groups are exempted from being labeled "telemarketers" as follows:

* charities that are registered in Canada;
* organizations that you've done business with in the past 18 months
* organizations to whom you have made an inquiry in the past 6 months;
* political parties, candidates, and associations of members of a political party;
* persons surveying the public;
* newspapers looking to solicit subscriptions;
* persons or entities to whom you have provided express consent to be called.

If you receive unwanted calls from any of the above exempted organizations (with the exception of the surveying companies), you can ask them directly to put your phone number of their own do not call list and they must comply with your request. It may take a few minutes, but you only have to do it once and that particular organization may not contact you again.