When Mr. Rogers took up our invitation to tea, he stressed to us that he was keen to hear of our experience with Rogers Communications. As he notes in several follow up letters, "the customer perspective is important to the continuous improvement of our operations..I am keen to meet with you, either in person at our offices or over the phone, so that I can listen to your experiences and learn from them."

When Mr. Rogers cancelled our scheduled rendezvous and suggested that we meet at his offices, or talk over the phone, I couriered a letter to Mr. Rogers explaining why that alteration in the plans was not palatable to me; and received one in return indicating that Mr. Roger's assistant would clear space on his calendar to facilitate a meeting, but only "at our offices or over the phone".

I am not prepared to displace myself any further for Rogers; which leaves us at the same distance from Rogers Communications that we were before Peter Cheney's article appeared in the Globe and Mail. This, I believe, is regrettable, because we had spent some time crafting a list of recommendations for the improvement of Rogers Wireless services by culling from both our own experiences and those of the many people who emailed me in December's media storm.

I was also hoping to discuss ways to preclude further legal action between Rogers and me arising out of the debacle associated with my cell phone.

The case against Rogers in Small Claims Court is rooted in contract law. There is, arguably, another cause of action based in tort, rooted in the breach of a duty of care. Harry Gefen captured a manager of Roger's Fraud Department stating that Rogers has had a protocol in place since 1997 for detecting atypical calling patterns. By voluntarily instituting this protocol, Rogers assumed a duty of care to ensure that it is applied fairly and diligently for all wireless consumers. In my case (and, it appears from other email testimonials, in countless other cases) Rogers breached their duty of care. Jan Innes, Vice President of Rogers Communications, spoke unequivocally for the corporation on national television, stating that "we did not follow our normal procedures in Ms. Drummond's case". Rogers fully acknowledges they have normal procedures in place. Breach of a duty of care provides the foundation for an action against Rogers in tort.

Rogers has an extraordinarily broad disclaimer clause on its contract at 'http://www.rogers.com/terms' which reads as follows:

This clause effectively says that Rogers can do virtually whatever it wants with impunity. Rogers can subject the consumer to ANY breach of contract, behave negligently or breach any duty of care that the law imposes, or violate any other established way that the law has evolved to protect consumers from arbitrarily and unjustly suffering damages . and that by signing the contract, the consumer has agreed to never pursue Rogers legally for those damages. The consumer (indicates this clause) has completely exonerated Rogers for responsibility for virtually every single one of its actions, no matter what Rogers does, no matter the harm it causes, and no matter how recklessly or negligently or unjustly Rogers has behaved. The consumer, by signing a contract containing this kind of exculpatory or disclaimer-of-liability clause, appears to have given Rogers a lifetime supply of "get out of jail free" cards.

It would appear, then, that any action I take against Rogers, for breach of contract or for tort, would be a hopeless cause. I had a chance to read the contract. I am a consenting adult. I signed away my rights.

But any first year law student can tell you that, despite what is written in black on white on the contract (albeit, in very small print), those kinds of clauses are routinely and successfully challenged in court on the grounds of unconscionability.

And Rogers knows full well that it is not by virtue of putting a clause on the contract and having consumers sign it that it is thereby rendered automatically enforceable. A classic example of the unenforcability of contractual clauses appears on Rogers Wireless Service Agreeement:

Clause 34 of the contract appears to commit clients to arbitration should a dispute arise. Although that clause has produced considerable material dividends for Rogers, primarily by completely inoculating the corporation against class action law suits, that clause was rendered fully unenforceable when the 2002 Ontario Consumer Protection Act came into force on July 30, 2005.

The arbitration clause is unenforceable in Ontario, as well as BC; and yet the clause still appears on the contract - a classic case of a contractual clause not being worth the paper it is written upon.

In light of the fact that the wireless industry is effectively unregulated in Canada and has been so since 1994, consumers are seemingly left with the options of either trusting wireless providers to regulate themselves, or pursing the unduly onerous choices of either proceeding to the courts or resorting to the media in the event of a dispute. Neither of the latter options can predictably provide much satisfaction to the consumer. The drawback of courts and the media as dispute resolution mechanisms is compounded by the steep asymmetry between the resources that an ordinary consumer and a large corporation can bring to bear within either of those forums.

Although I believe that the wireless industry as a whole should be better regulated, in the absence of such governmental oversight, I had been hoping to rely upon another option (though clearly rare and privileged) of direct and private communication of my concerns to the head of the corporation. This approach begins with some faith that corporate self-regulation might indeed produce beneficial outcomes for all parties involved.

Skeptical as I might have been that Mr. Rogers might be sincere about attending to consumer needs, skeptical as I remain about the capacity of industries to regulate themselves appropriately without government oversight, I was prepared to take it on faith and trust that Mr. Rogers was sincere in his desire to hear about our concerns firsthand. That faith now appears to have been ill-placed.

It had been my intention to distill the vast body of emails I had received and share a distillation of other consumers' experiences with Mr. Rogers. Now that that has been precluded by the 11th hour cancellation, I invite others to submit both their own troubled troubled experiences with Rogers along with further consumer recommendations.