May 16th, 2005

Filed under:
Politics
4 Comments »

The BC Liberals Just Phone-Spammed Me

I’m not voting for them tomorrow anyway, but this might have turned me right off. I check my voicemail, and find that the BC Liberal party has left me an automated, recorded message advocating that I vote for them. A few questions immediately occur to me:

  1. Why have they chosen to pick on me?
  2. Isn’t this illegal in Canada?
  3. Why, in a culture that demonizes junk mail (both actual and virtual), do they think that spamming me with a generic, recorded (and, I might add, awkwardly formal) message will get me to vote for them?

Comments: 4 Responses so far

Andrea
May 16th, 2005
9:09 pm

I got the same spam. I contacted Telus and complained about this during the last election. Parties can legally phone-spam you if they are not soliciting anything. So, if they say that they’re calling to encourage you to vote and then they give you some information (such as who to phone if you don’t know where to vote), they can legally phone-spam. If they simply spammed to tell you to vote Liberal, then it would be illegal. But the spam I received (last time and this time) told me tomorrow was voting day, who I could call to find out where to vote, etc. This makes it legal. Of course, the big ad for the Liberals at the end is a bit iffy in my books. I just pressed 7.

Telus writes this up at http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/INFO_SHT/t1022.htm.

Trashbusters regularly phone spams me and I’m sure it’s NOT legal. I am also certain that Big Brothers gave them my number.

By the way, when are you going to re-instate copy for your posts?

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Darren
May 16th, 2005
9:19 pm

Thanks for that, Andrea. I had faith you’d get to the bottom of it.

As for the copying–I haven’t actively ‘turned it off’ or anything. It’s a flaw of the design, which I’ve yet to sort out. It works in Firefox, my browser of choice, so I’m blissfully unaware of the problem. I’ll try to get around to sorting it out.

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Jason
May 17th, 2005
8:04 am

I got phone-spammed by both parties.

I hate politicians and parties.

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alexis
May 17th, 2005
9:46 am

During the last provincial election in SK, we got a phone survey from the conservative party candidate. The voice phoned us, said he didn’t have time to phone us all personally and proceeded to try and “poll” us on issues we felt were important. I found it insulting, as the other 2 candidates phoned our house themselves.

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