To Hell With Bell Canada

A Comment by Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

The late American satirist/comedian Lenny Bruce once warned that it is not a good idea to “get fresh with the telephone company” because if you do “they’ll leave you with a couple of cans and a string.”

Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to an old Bell image like this? Especially if you have to pay your bill. Screw Bell if it continues to outsource jobs to sweatshops overseas.

That was back in the days – some half five or so decades ago – when the Bell telephone company held us all in a vice grip if we wanted to own or use a phone, and was a virtual monopoly across North America. It was also a time when we in Canada embraced Alexander Graham Bell, who spent some years of his life living in a place near Niagara, Ontario and was allegedly was the founder of the telephone while in this country.

Whatever the case for Bell and his consummating his phone invention here as opposed to the U.S., where he also migrated from his native Scotland, Bell, I remember growing up in the 1960s and on with a Bell Canada telephone company that had never shrieked away from capitalizing on Bell’s invention in Canada. It was always part of the mythology when my parents and all of their friends and neighbours across the country got their bills from Bell, which was a virtual monopoly back then and isn’t far away from that today, thanks to successive federal governments that give telecommunications corporations, in particular, a license to plunder Canadian consumers without a chance for competition from the U.S. or elsewhere.

I am prepared to say that I am almost willing to put up with protecting Bell Canada from foreign competition if it was a truly Canadian company that hired Canadian workers and paid them livable wages. But this is what I got – and not for the first time – today, this August 4^th.

As a reluctant Bell customer, I tried to dial information to find someone I wanted to contact in nearby Fort Erie, Ontario.

The person I got on the line spoke in broken English, which normally I can handle, and said they could not find that person after I attempted to spell the name –a simple one – about two or three times. I then asked where she was located as a Bell 411 representative and she said the Philippines.

At that point I asked if they were paying her fifty cents an hour to do the job and she said less. I replied by saying she and her cohorts should start at union and she simply laughed. I replied; “What are you worried about? That they will take you out and shoot you?” No reply to that one.

I ended by saying; ‘Well God bless you,” and she said; “God bless you sir.”  At which point I wondered when the building might collapse, as the one did in a sweatshop in Bangladesh and possibly kill all of these poor people.

Bell Canada today is another example of what free trade in these times has become under the governments that are screwing in favour of the corporate elites and their shareholders. It is all about corporations like Bell being able to outsource jobs that could go to Canadians tocheapest  sweat shops around the world while the rest of us pay higher and higher rates, through our blood and guts, for their services.

The sooner the rest of us can find a way of getting around companies like Bell and other monopoly telecommunication corporations to communicate with each other, the better off the world will be.

We need to collectively find some way of launching something similar to the American revolution against these corporate pirates that are eating us alive.

(Niagara At Large invites all those who are willing to share their real names to respond below.)