Originally written and posted Monday, May 14th, 2012, and updated Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 to add some relevant scanned images and an update with regards to the complaint I had filed with the Better Business Bureau. Updated Friday, May 18th, 2012 with a further update about the BBB, Canada Post, and the Ontario Energy Board. Updated Tuesday, June 12th, 2012 re: the phone call we received on Saturday, June 9th, 2012.
Another update: Speaking of reading ability, the next two JE reps who came one after another (and started in immediately with many of the same misrepresentations and outright lies outlined here) in October 2012 completely ignored the 'NO SOLICITORS' sign on our mailbox and were thankfully escorted off our property by the next neighbour they tried (I didn't have the energy or courage to go that far that day.) I've made a bigger sign with an explicit ban on JE. How it fares remains to be seen.
This is the account of our visit from an employee (or Independent Contractor...not sure how it works but that's the term used on their form) of Just Energy Ontario L.P. named Sarah. I will put a footnote beside everything that later turned out to be blatantly false or misleading. Update 2012/05/16: I forgot to correct this before to mention that some of the illegal actions by Just Energy ICs committed that day, e.g. the verbal assault, littering, and trespassing, I have not footnoted where they occur in this account, since I thought they were obvious and did not need further explanation.
Our visit began shortly before 3pm on Saturday, May 12th, 2012. Sarah showed up at our door with some forms. She may or may not have introduced herself, but she did not give a business card [1] and was not wearing a badge [2] (it was with the papers she was holding). She said she needed to check our hydro bill quickly (she tried to keep everything at a fast pace) for the Ontario energy credit.[3] Being wary of electricity scams that I had heard of over the past five years or so, I said that I didn't have our bill handy and she could just leave the forms with me to look over. She said it'd be better to sign up now, because we would get a $50 [4] credit on our bill [5], and that practically everyone else in our co-op had already done this: we were among the last three.[6] Since we were one of the newer members of our co-op, having moved in late November, 2011, I took her at her word and went and got the bill. When I returned with it, I asked her if she was from Waterloo North Hydro, and she said that she was with "the green energy company", which I at first took a bit literally to mean that she was with a company called The Green Energy Company [7] (I hadn't heard of it, but I also hadn't heard of Just Energy, either.) She went on to explain that Ontario was getting rid of coal and nuclear and focusing on wind, solar, etc. (that much I had read in the news) and that almost everyone in the province had signed up to convert to this.[8]
I was still skeptical at this point, so I insisted on reading the forms we were being asked to sign. She assured me that there was no risk in signing, because of all the scams going around, there was a new law this year [9] allowing a cool-off period, so that we could cancel in the next ten days without trouble.[10] She underlined on a form called Electricity Contracts / Disclosure Statement that if we did not verify the contract after signing, "it will become invalid." It's at this point that I noticed that she was holding what I thought were two copies of this form, stacked in such a way that the this form was on top and one underneath had only its signature line (the bottom 2 cm of the form) peeking out, and assumed that the one underneath was for the next person she would be calling on--so little of it was showing, and they're tall forms, it'd be easy for them to slide a bit from being stacked squarely. So I read the main form, the Just Energy Customer Agreement (ON_SVC_PAD_MT_CODE34667_117190_V2_APR_24_12) and insisted on reading through the terms. I took a look at the page underneath the white top page I was looking at, and it was a pink carbon copy, so it seemed that the form was only one page. The only HINT on this page that there are more pages, is right at near the bottom, where it says, "For more details please see paragraph 6 'Charges under this Agreement'." Sarah never indicated that there were more terms to read, despite my expressed interest to read all the terms before signing anything. Also this is the only form I've ever come across (and I'm an administrator, I fill out a lot of forms) where the signature comes *before* the full set of terms and conditions, unless they're in an entirely separate document. It doesn't even say something like "page 1 of 4".
That's not the only problem with the form itself. It also says, "You received a text-based copy of this Agreement, including the Disclosure Statement(s) and Price Comparison Document(s), before signing this agreement." However, the Disclosure Statement states at the bottom, in bold, "This disclosure statement is not part of the contract." Unfortunately, due to the fast pace of the conversation and the fact that I'd already spent 20 minutes of my free Saturday time on an unsolicited sales call, my initial read of both these pages did not result in me realizing this contradiction. In fact, due to the "(s)" in the statement on the form, I didn't even realize that I had not been shown a Price Comparison Document, either. As it later turned out, this was the document that I had thought was a second copy of the Disclosure Statement, hiding underneath it with only its signature line showing.[11]
But I did insist on reading the disclosure statement, which convinced me that it was from the Ontario Energy Board and not their company. That reassured me enough about our ability to cancel the whole thing to continue the conversation. Sarah explained that we would be saving money because the most we would ever pay is under the mid-peak price.[12] She then underlined our on-peak time on our bill and said, in her words, "that will be wiped off your bill." I asked her about this, because it didn't make sense to me. To me "wiped off" means erased, meaning we don't have to pay for it--but that couldn't be right, because on-peak time is the most expensive for the company to provide, there's no way they would it give it for free. I explained this a couple times to her (each time eliciting a response of on-peak being "wiped off your bill"), and after pressing the issue, she admitted that she had only worked there a week or two and didn't quite have all the details down yet. I said I understood, that it takes time to get used to a new job, and related one of my own experiences at a new job, not getting really in the groove for the first month or two. She asked how she was doing but at first, because I had just mentioned my experience, I misheard her as asking how I was doing now with it, and I said, "okay, I guess." When I saw her reaction I then realized what she had actually said and, embarrassed, retracted my "okay" and said she was doing just fine and explained how I had misheard and even repeated my "okay, I guess" in a much more dramatic way, and we shared a laugh about it, and she said that was good to hear, and that all my skepticism and questions were good because they were a good learning process for her, things she'll have to find out about so she's more ready with answers. I apologetically told her I did believe we'd be saving money, but there were so many scams, I needed to check.
After this point she knows she has my trust and sympathy, and even if she has only been there for one week, she seems to be aware that now she can use it to just override the printed words we're binding ourselves to with my partner's signature. We return to the bottom of the form, which says "Mid-Peak RPP Price - 0.1 cents / kWh for a 5 Year Term" and although I've become convinced by hear that this only lowers our on-peak price and does not raise our off-peak price, she preemptively explains that the "5 Year Term" (she had the gall to underline it while contradicting it) does not lock us into this pricing [13] and merely protects [14] us for 5 years even if we move (hey! bonus! that sounds nice, right?), but after that we can renew it ourselves just by calling them.
After signing [15] the Price Comparison Document that we were kept from reading, Sarah crossed out, on our yellow carbon copy, the two parts of the comparison, explaining that "this really only applies to rich people" who "live in mansions" and "keep everything running all day." [16] I said that we had a refrigerator going and such but otherwise tried to keep it to a minimum, so I thought, I guess that's true, and still did not read the actual comparison until after she left, trusting that she had a reason to cross it out, just as she had crossed out the natural gas part of the contract and brochure earlier. She was good at crossing out inapplicable things. It made sense and simplified things and by this point it would have been nice to get on with enjoying my Saturday afternoon with my daughter and my partner who was leaving the next day, which, it turned out, thanks to Sarah and Just Energy, would be more difficult to enjoy than it should have been. I now feel foolish, looking at this Price Comparison Document, which has essentially nothing that wasn't crossed out by Sarah, except for my partner's signature (and other signature carbon from the Disclosure Statement that was on top of it.) Had I read these crossed-out sections I certainly would never have told my partner that it seemed legitimate to sign, because it clearly shows, based on a hypothetical residential customer who uses 64% off-peak, 18% mid-peak, and 18% on-peak, that they would pay about 23% more for their electricity every month if they signed up with Just Energy ($79.20 as opposed to sticking with our utility for $64.53.) Update 2012/05/16: I just took a second to calculate how much our last bill would be with Just Energy @ 9.1 cents / kWh (since at the time of our last bill, mid-peak was 9.2 cents / kWh), and it's about 15% more than with Waterloo North Hydro. I wish I had done this in the first place. A
real salesperson would have insisted upon it.
This is where Sarah's use of their brochure is also a shining example of deception. The brochure shows the same time-of-use charts the province has put out, and says, "If you are like most Canadian consumers, a significant portion of your electricity usage will occur in expensive mid-peak and peak periods." Sarah explained that this is how it is with our current bill. She then drew a line between that part and the next part, which has no pie charts--because that would make it obvious that "most" and "significant" are highly relative terms, and obvious that the off-peak price *increases* to just below the mid-peak, which I did not realize until after she left--and reiterated that after signing up with MyTime advantage everything is cheaper.
After she left, and I started to realize what had just happened, I went online to check up on these things. Unfortunately, at the time, both
oeb.gov.on.ca and
ontarioenergyboard.ca were down (verified with
downforeveryoneorjustme.com ) so while I started finding blog postings about Just Energy and checking the Better Business Bureau web site's profile of them, an e-mail came in from one of my neighbours, reporting that he had just been visited by Just Energy and had been lied to. Meanwhile my next door neighbour heard me cursing while reading about Just Energy and realizing just how extensive their misdeeds had been, from Sarah who had appeared to be a nice person and had the nerve to wish my partner a happy Mother's Day while having just signed her over to pay more for our necessities. He let me know that the neighbour who had sent the e-mail was over at the other end of the co-op asking the three Just Energy representatives to leave. So I went over there to meet him coming back from around the corner where the representatives had just been asked to leave, and after exchanging a few words, he saw that he had my support and we went together to ask them again to leave the co-op property.
There we found Sarah, and reps whom I will call R1 and R2 since I don't know their names, sitting on the curb together. My neighbour told them that they had lied to us, and that they were not welcome here. They (throughout here, mostly R1 and R2; Sarah may actually have been telling the truth about being new, because she didn't talk much during this interaction) responded quite defensively, saying that we weren't officially signed up if we didn't activate, etc. (see [10] again for my skepticism on this.) We began to explain precisely how they had mislead us and why we didn't want our neighbours--some of whom are elderly, others on disability, etc.--to also be mislead. They accused my neighbour of being "full of shit" and said that he had "escaped from an insane asylum." We again asked that they leave, and said that we should be calling the cops, to which they responded that they should be calling the cops on us because we were harassing them. They said that we should leave them alone because they were just waiting for their ride. We said they could wait off of our property, on the traffic island or the walking trail about 20m away. They said where they currently were wasn't our property. We said it was, because this was a co-op, and the members all own it together. R1 responded by saying a co-op was "just" government housing, which it isn't--only a small portion of our co-op is subsidized by the government, but the co-op itself, as we said, is owned and operated by its members, together. They still refused to leave, and R1 said that the conversation was over. R2, who had been smoking, at this point threw her cigarette butt on our walkway. I told her that recently we had all been out here and I personally had cleaned up many cigarette butts, and asked if she could pick it up. She responded by asking what she should do with it, since there was no garbage can or ashtray around. I asked her why she wasn't carrying anything to put it away in. She didn't respond. (I've never smoked, so I don't know how these things work, but nonetheless, this added to the list of ways we had just been treated disrespectfully today.)
Ignoring R1's claim that the conversation was already over, I pointed out something I had
just read online, that legitimate salespeople wear badges and distribute business cards. They showed that they had their badges with their forms (not the same as wearing them) and R1, despite her own claim that the conversation was over, also then said that the business card rule was for commercial, not residential. [17] My neighbour then asked to see their badges. They covered them up, R2 adding, "No, then you'll just file some stupid complaint!" My neighbour responded by affirming her logic. Nonetheless, he and I are not very pushy by nature and were clearly out of our element in dealing with these three, so we left them there (they still refused to leave our property) warning them that if we saw them making any more sales calls here we would be calling the police. They said that was fine, their ride would be here in a half hour; one of them then joked that that would be all the more motivation to make another sales call, just to see what would happen with the cops. I started to say that I realized there are some crappy jobs out there and that these days you don't always get a job you can feel good about doing, when R1 cut in with, "Whaddaya mean? I love my job," and that anyway this conversation was over a long time ago. We walked away. Unfortunately we were not able to monitor them as well as we had told them just then, and later we heard from another neighbour very close to where they were that they had also been conned into signing up. It's not clear (our memories and records of what occurred when are not precise enough) whether they came back for another sales call despite our warning and their assurance that they were done here, or if this other neighbour was just one of the last ones they visited, but after everything else it wouldn't surprise me either way.
As my neighbours have also expressed about this situation, it's not so much that we signed up and have to cancel--although that bugs me too--but just how deceitful these representatives were that really hurts us. We have enough other things to deal with in life without such visits that leave you feeling that either you have to never trust anyone at your door in the slightest, or risk being scammed. It's really erosive to community trust, to trust in human beings; the whole thing just makes you feel dirty, like someone has attacked you for no reason. I've had a headache since then, and trouble sleeping. I hope that by having written this out, I can more easily put it behind me, and hopefully help others to avoid getting caught up in such a thing in the first place. I feel I'm a pretty cautious person with good reading skills. I also have a math degree from the University of Waterloo. If I can get duped so easily, I worry for the more vulnerable among us.
Sincerely,
Kevin Field
Resident of Waterloo, ON
PS I'm submitting this to the Better Business Bureau, among other places, but I have to note that I'm not entirely confident in their system, which
gives our regional Just Energy company an A- on a scale of A+ down to F.
PPS Update 2012/05/16 on my interaction with the BBB: It gets "better" in that the "Better Business Bureau" closed my complaint after talking with me yesterday on the 15th. Agent Theresa from the BBB basically told
me it's my fault for signing, the OEB provisions don't help and the BBB has nothing to do with them, and that I'd
better spend money on sending a formal cancellation request (per the 2002-legislated cooling off period, not the 2010/2011 OEB legislation...and not even per the 2002-legislated
right to cancel if they lied to you or did not provide all the information, even if it's not within 10 days) by
registered mail even though Just Energy said on the phone they had
cancelled*, because you're only protected if you take extra steps to protect yourself this way. With such falsely expedited complaint resolution, it's no wonder the BBB feels justified in its A- rating of Just Energy by
the manner of the "response to 479 complaint(s) filed against business" and the manner of the "resolution of complaint(s) filed against business." This whole interaction seems to be fighting wholeheartedly against their vision of
"An ethical marketplace where buyers and sellers can trust each other," but then again,
the BBB isn't listed on its own web site, so at this point my recourse for complaining, I suppose, is to be rich enough to afford a lawyer. No can do.
* The cancellation was obtained after the fourth call, which my partner made on the 15th, and in which Just Energy's Amrit, ID 75228, insisted that there would be no cancellation confirmation number, and hassled her for details even though it's her right to cancel for any reason whatsoever and she had already told him some of the principal reasons, that they had lied to us and directly insulted us while on our property.) So much for "better" business. I was tempted to call back after thinking about my conversation with Theresa at the BBB, but I'm not even going to bother getting into it, because she was just as pushy as Sarah at Just Energy (and their phone reps), if not more, and, it seems pretty clear from our conversation, had not even read the story of my complaint and wasn't even up-to-date on provincial consumer protection legislation.
Update 2012/05/18: Today I received a letter in the mail from the BBB stating: "We regret to inform you that your BBB cannot process your complaint. [...] The following items are not handled by your BBB: [...a long list of things that don't apply except for...,] criminal allegations, [...], cancellation of contracts [...]." Sure, those two things are PART of our complaint. However, if NO part of our complaint actually does fall within the BBB's scope, I'm not sure what the point of the BBB is (especially given that I had trouble choosing a subcategory to file the complaint under, because so many of their subcategories DID apply.) Meanwhile we had succumbed to the BBB's scary stories of what happens if you don't protect yourself by sending a cancellation letter by registered mail, and sent it. According to Canada Post's tracking system, it was successfully delivered, but the signatory name and signature are not available. So I called them, and thank you Canada Post that I didn't have to wait on hold, but apparently the driver is able to register something as "delivered" before it actually is. Further update 2012/05/18: as of 3:15 pm the signature did show up, even though since 12:17 it has been marked as delivered, and now the signature appears as if it happened before it was marked as delivered, also at 12:17. It was signed for by one J Downey. So they got our formal cancellation-reply (we want a letter back saying that it's cancelled, my partner explicitly stated in the letter) request within ten days of the sales call, for the record.
Meanwhile on 2012/05/18 a representative from the Ontario Energy Board called, with reference number 20120006138, to say that the complaint would be sent to the company, and said that the legislation does say we can cancel via letter but that some companies also allow cancellations by phone. She also confirmed, however, what I had tried to tell the BBB agent, that the signature does not cause the contract to come into effect until it is validated by phone, because it falls under the 2011 legislation, not the 2002 legislation. She stated that what the BBB agent had said about this, that it does not protect us sufficiently from having our account definitively cancelled, was misinformation. However, I still am not sure I trust Just Energy to follow the 2011 rules, since they, as I showed above, went out of their way to skirt them already: that is to say, we legally do not have to do anything except wait for Just Energy to call, and then tell them that we do not wish to validate the contract, but our experience thus far suggests that it would not be beyond the record of their tactics to do something like "accidentally" activate the contract in their system contrary to our verbal non-authorization over the phone. It would be much harder to undo that than it would be to do it in the first place, which so far has been the whole nature of their game. So, as the OEB rep said, now we wait.
So far, this nice little "no obligation" visit from "Just" Energy has cost me and my partner over 12 hours of labour and $8.25 in postage. I'll be glad when this really is finally over. Hopefully the last piece of this headache of a puzzle will be when the Ontario Energy Board responds to my complaint.
Another update on 2012/06/12: This past Saturday a Just Energy representative called our house, and since I had someone visiting briefly and it was already clear that they weren't able to get into any actual details (so said the representative, anyway) I asked if they would call me back in 20 minutes, and she said she would. Not only did that not happen, but as of Tuesday nobody has bothered calling us again.
[1] According to
http://www.ontarioenergyboard.ca/OEB/Consumers/Energy+Contracts/Before+Signing+an+Energy+Contract "A salesperson who comes to your home or business must provide a business card that includes, among other things, their name and the name, address, phone number and Ontario Energy Board licence number of the company they represent."
[2] According to
http://www.ontarioenergyboard.ca/OEB/Consumers/Energy+Contracts/Before+Signing+an+Energy+Contract salespeople "must also wear a valid identification badge that includes, among other things, their name, a recent photo, and the name of the company they represent."
[3] The Ontario energy credit has nothing to do with Just Energy. According to one former Just Energy employee, the reason they check the bill is to verify that you're not already signed up with a term contract. See "Posted by: Julia | Saturday, September 04, 2010 at 12:27 PM" at
http://ivebeenmugged.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/05/just-energy.html .
[4] This should have been "up to," which she never said. It's actually only $25 since we don't also have gas service--she never ended up mentioning this. Update 2012/05/16: This is the fine print of enrollment brochure ON_DUAL_PREDTBLL_MYTME_BROCHURE_EN_v11_MAR_27_2012, the one they write your activation code on:
[5] It's actually a prepaid MasterCard. Ibid.
[6] I've personally so far talked to people from four other units since Sarah visited, who have verified that they do not have a contract with Just Energy. This is the second time in the past six months, according to one neighbour, that Just Energy has come around here.
[7] Although the forms we ended up signing do say "Just Energy" on them, the pace of the conversation was kept fast enough that it did not click in my mind to call her out on this. Meanwhile, she never verbally named Just Energy as the one she was representing.
[8] The provincial government's overall energy plan and people's signatures on Just Energy forms are two different things. Also, nowhere in the contract does it mention Just Energy actually ensuring a green energy supply like Bullfrog and other companies. They may do it, but it's certainly not what they're advertising. And I don't think it's too unfair an assumption to make, in this era of greenwashing, that if a company was a green energy supplier they would add that to their brochure, especially with companies like Bullfrog using it as their main selling point, as can be seen on their front page at
http://www.bullfrogpower.com/ . Also, according to one neighbour, several people who have signed up for Just Energy from here in the past were merely given energy saving kits as a signup bonus, but this wasn't part of our conversation with Sarah. Furthermore, after some research, Just Energy does appear to offer a green program, JustGreen Power (
http://www.justenergy.com/green-energy/our-green-products/ ) , but nowhere in the papers left us is this mentioned. In fact, the product we were pressured into signing up for is called MyTime (
http://www.justenergy.com/residential/products-and-rates/ ) from their web site does not appear to be green-sourced.
[9] It came into effect January 1, 2011 according to
http://news.ontario.ca/mei/en/2010/04/new-protections-for-energy-consumers.html .
[10] About 20-30 minutes after she left, and I realized we did not want this contract, we called Just Energy to cancel. The man I talked to said since it was so recent, it was not yet in the system. However, Sarah had called them, from our phone, to obtain an activation code for us by doing just that: putting us in the system. I said this to him, and he said he couldn't do anything about it, and that we would have to phone again in 1-2 days. I asked if he couldn't put a post-it note on his desk to take it out of the system when it was available. He said no. My partner, the signatory, is away now for the next week, even if it is available. So, that's fine, it's still within 10 days, after she gets back. As if we have nothing better to do, and, all this from an unsolicited sales call. According to the Energy Board, if we do not verify the contact, it becomes invalid. But can I trust, after everything else I am recording here, that Just Energy will properly follow that rule? I guess we will find out. She just notified me (today, May 14th, 2012) that she tried calling the number that Just Energy included in her sign-up e-mail (we never activated, thankfully) and that when she phones it says their office is currently closed (at 1pm on a Monday? when their reps are even out on Saturdays?) and or it says that the number is not in service.
[11] I have evidence of this, thanks to carbon copy technology: you can clearly see on the Price Comparison Document a second, slightly more faded, signature and date above the first, where, when my partner signed the Disclosure Statement, her signature went through 3 layers instead of 1 to get to the carbon copy of the Price Comparison Document. So it was clearly signed without my partner getting to read it first either! Furthermore, if you place the one on top of the other such that the faint signature lines up with the stronger impression of it, so you can see how the pages were arranged at the time of signing, not even the line above the signature is showing. Had it been, it might have been more obvious that two different documents were being signed, because on the Price Comparison Document it says in normal type, "I acknowledge that I have read and understood this price comparison" whereas the Disclosure Statement says, in bold type, "I acknowledge that I have read and understood this Disclosure Statement", which sticks out a bit further and catches the eye. This left only the tiny document control number in the lower right hand corner as the only difference to be noticed between the two papers being signed: DSEL012011 vs NER700. Again, with a fast-paced conversation that you never asked for, this is not a detail that might easily be picked up. Update 2012/05/16: here are two scans, showing how the DS was covering up everything on the PCD except the very bottom at the time of signing and dating (I've left my partner's signature off this so as not to drag her into it, but you can tell from the date alone just the same):
(You can tell the two dates apart pretty easily by the style of the "1" in the year. If you then line up the stronger imprint over the lighter imprint, you see how it looked during the signing of both documents):
[12] This is not saving money. What she never mentioned is that your cost for your off-peak usage will also be mid-peak pricing minus a tenth of a cent. Since, like most people--especially those who try to make use of TOU pricing to save money--our off-peak usage is the majority of our usage, there is no possible way that nearly doubling the price of the majority, even if a minority also gets cut back 20% in price, results in a net savings. This would have been abundantly clear if we had been shown the Price Comparison Document, but more on that later.
[13] That's exactly what it does, unless you are willing to pay "liquidated damages in the amount of $100 for each full and partial year left in the Term, per Location," according to paragraph 10 of the terms I did not even know existed until after she left. So, sure, if you have up to $500 that you don't mind giving to Just Energy, you can purchase the right to not be locked in, any time.
[14] This may or may not be true, in the same sense that locking yourself into a particular mortgage rate may or may not "protect" you from a market fluctuation that is not in your favour. If electricity goes down, it's protecting you from savings. Furthermore, it doesn't even appear to do that. According to the line just below it, "The Mid-Peak RPP Price may change every six months in accordance with OEB policies and practices and the Customer will not receive notice of such change." So, if my understanding is correct now, you're locked in for five years to a price that changes every six months, on the first less-than-six-month span of which you can know in advance.
[15] Again some carbon copy evidence, there are blue pen marks on our carbon copy, distinct from the black carbon of the signature and date. Furthermore, the other neighbour I mention later who also was conned into signing up, said that Sarah, who was the rep who visited them too, also crossed out the price comparison document after they had signed it. Update 2012/05/16, see for yourself:
[16] I work from home but don't usually heat the house much and work off a low-power laptop. Our last bill showed that we used 57% off-peak, 19% mid-peak, and 24% on-peak, so apparently according to Sarah's estimation, we're much more wasteful than the supposedly rich, mansion-owning energy gobblers the Ontario Energy Board allegedly decided to select as a useful example for the average household to read.
[17] See footnote [1]: the rules are, "home or business."
