Negative option billing gets a bad rap nowadays. Who wants to be on the hook for something you haven’t asked for—an insurance plan, say—even if you have 30 days to call a toll-free number, hang on the line for a human voice, and decline the offer?
Here’s how negative billing works. A company gives you a service–such as accident insurance–without asking you first. Then you get 30 days or so to actively cancel the product before they charge you for it, usually with an automatic credit card deduction.
Canadian law now forbids negative billing. According to the 2012 Canadian Negative Option Billing Regulations, before “providing a person with a new primary financial or optional product or service, an institution must first obtain the person’s express consent to do so, either orally or in writing.”
In 1912, however, you could get away with this practice . . . if you were a priest.
Back then, Father Michael Vincent Kelly was 49 and had been the reverend of St. Basil’s parish since 1904.
Kelly was—as far as priests go—a troublemaker. He ran afoul of the Vatican by advocating views on touchy subjects, such as mixed marriages and Catholic catechisms. The Vatican, not appreciating Kelly’s forthrightness, removed him from his St. Basil’s job in 1914 and forced him to live outside Ontario until 1920.
But back to negative billing. In 1912, when Kelly was parish priest at St. Basil’s, Mary Hoskin was a 63-year-old Catholic author and philanthropist who lived with the sisters at the Convent of the Precious Blood, a cloister on the grounds now occupied by the St. Mike’s Library.
She had just published her History of St. Basil’s Parish. Father Robert McBrady, C.S.B., in his foreword, refers to the 172-page volume with kind magnanimity as “a charming record”. McBrady, a former student, now taught at St. Mike’s and was also Superior of the college. It made perfect sense, McBrady said, that she’d asked him to “wish God-speed to your pretty book” because he’d been at St. Basil’s longer than anyone else.
Though she followed up her parish history with The Little Green Glove, and Other Stories (1920), Mary Hoskin was not just an author—and she wasn’t just any Catholic, either. Her major talents were charity fundraising and social service. In recognition of her work, Pope Pius XI decorated Hoskin in 1924 with the Cross Pro-Ecclesia-Et-Pontifice.
The parish history may have been Kelly’s idea, but writing it was Hoskin’s task; and finding “absolutely no records [had] been kept of parish affairs”, her painstaking plunge into the topic would have ended in shipwreck had she not reached out to people “both in the priesthood and laity” through interviews and letters.
There was much to tell. Father Jean-Mathieu Soulerin, C.S.B., founder and Superior of St. Michael’s, is depicted with mischievous zest. Quoting an unnamed source, Hoskin says “two things were characteristic [of Soulerin]: first, the plain walking stick, with a bone head, always thrust under the left arm, never carried in his hand; next, a big pocket bulging with sweeties.”
She reports an early encounter between St. Mike’s and UofT, probably in the 1850s—personified by Soulerin and Dr. John McCaul, UofT’s second president. Soulerin and McCaul, Hoskin says, would often meet on the grounds between St. Mike’s and UofT, and when they
came within twenty feet of each other, each commenced to draw from his pocket a huge snuff-box, to be ready for an interchange of pinches, and then, after a pleasant greeting and fitting anecdotes and, what was more common then than now, an apt quotation from the classics, they walked on.
From Hoskin, Mary. History of St. Basil’s Parish. Catholic Register and Canadian Extension, 1912.
The Catholic Register and Canadian Extension, Canada’s major Catholic newspaper, published Hoskin’s book in 1912. Naturally, the paper hoped to sell copies, but few would likely buy it except Catholics and, particularly, Catholics in St. Basil’s parish. Still, Father Kelly had an idea.
He persuaded the printers to slip a small note into copies of the book and leave them on the doorsteps of likely buyers. The note said:
The publishers of the “History of St. Basil’s Parish,” at the suggestion of Rev. Father Kelly, Parish Priest, take the liberty of leaving a copy of the book at your house. The price is $1.00.
So did these lucky homeowners get the book for free?
Alas, no:
The agent will call in a few days, and if the book meets with your favor, will you please pay him $1.00? If not, return the book to him.
Did this marketing strategy work? Well, all signs point to Yes: The Kelly Library has four copies.
Student assistant Sarah Blenko found Kelly’s plucky note by accident in a copy of Hoskin’s book while working with the library’s rare book collection.
Works Consulted
“Hoskin, Mary.” Canada’s Early Women Writers. SFU Library Digital Collections. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. 1980-2014. http://digital.lib.sfu.ca/ceww-683/hoskin-mary
Hoskin, Mary. History of St. Basil’s Parish. Catholic Register and Canadian Extension, 1912.
Kelly, M.V.. Some of the Pastor’s Problems. St. Michael’s College, 1920. https://archive.org/details/someofthepastors00kelluoft/page/n3
“Negative Option Billing Regulations.” Consolidated Regulations. SOR/2012-23. Justice Laws Website, Government of Canada, 2012. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/SOR-2012-23/FullText.html
Platt, P. Wallace, ed.. “Kelly, Michael Vincent.” Dictionary of Basilian Biography: Lives of Members of the Congregation of Priests of Saint Basil from its Origins in 1822 to 2002, 321-324, University of Toronto Press, 2005. http://www.basilian.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/DictionaryBasilianBiography.pdf