CRTC (Canada)

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is the federal body that sets the rules for calling Canadian phone numbers. If your VICIdial campaign dials anyone in Canada, the CRTC's rules apply to you no matter where your servers or your agents sit. The three pieces that matter most day to day are Canada's own Do Not Call registry, mandatory and accurate caller identification, and strict time-of-day limits. None of these are optional, and the fines for ignoring them are real.

What the CRTC checks

First, you scrub leads against Canada's national dnc registry, which is run separately from the U.S. list, so a file that is clean for American calling is not automatically clean for Canada. Second, you must transmit an accurate caller name and number that the person can actually call back, which means anything resembling caller id spoofing is a problem. Third, you respect a tight calling curfew — generally limited evening hours on weekdays and an even narrower window on weekends. These rules rhyme with the U.S. tcpa but are not identical, so do not copy your American settings over and assume you are covered.

In VICIdial, the practical setup is a dedicated Canadian campaign with its own dnc list, its own permitted-hours window keyed to each lead's local time, and a caller ID that genuinely belongs to your business and reaches a real desk. Keeping Canadian and U.S. traffic in separate campaigns makes scrubbing, pacing, and reporting far easier than mixing them in one bucket, much the same way you would isolate UK traffic for the ofcom regime. The CRTC also expects a fast, honored opt-out: when someone asks not to be called again, that request has to stick and propagate to every list you run. None of this is legal advice — it is the operational shape of staying inside the lines.