Canada’s banned activation and cancellation fees on June 12. Retention just became a communications problem.
On June 12, a rule that had been coming for months finally landed. Under CRTC policy 2026-43, Canadian carriers can no longer charge you to activate a plan, change a plan, or cancel one, unless there’s a subsidized device involved. The activation fee that had crept up to $80 at the big three is simply gone.
You could tell how ready everyone was by what happened next. Within days, several carriers rolled out new charges to replace the old ones. Bell and Telus added fees. Rogers and Fido introduced a device setup charge and a shipping charge. The CRTC sent every one of them a letter, asked them to justify the new charges, and warned of formal action. The Canadian Telecommunications Association had called the rule unwarranted, and the speed of those replacement fees suggested the carriers felt the same. The policy had been public since March. June still arrived before the core Customer Billing systems did.
The friction that kept customers is gone
Step back from the fee fight, because the bigger shift is strategic. For years, switching costs did quiet work for carriers. An $80 activation fee, the hassle of cancelling, the paperwork, the vague sense it would all be a pain: every bit of that kept some people from leaving even when a better deal sat right in front of them. A BMO analyst estimated activation fees alone were worth around $100 million a year to the big three. That friction is mostly gone now. The Credit Counselling Society figures the changes will save Canadians more than $600 million a year, which is another way of saying that’s $600 million of retention that used to come for free.
So the question every CMO and business-unit head in Canadian telecom and financial services should be sitting with is a plain one. When customers can leave with no fee and no friction, what makes them stay? The honest answer is the relationship. And a big part of that relationship runs through the strategic side of Customer Billing and the messages around it.
This is a communications problem now
Here’s where a lot of legacy architectures are quietly exposed. The new rules reach further than a deleted fee. They fundamentally alter what your transactional communications have to say and do, changing Customer Billing workflows in a few concrete ways.
Start with the obvious. Every bill and customer notice that mentioned an activation, modification, or cancellation fee is now out of date, and someone has to find and fix all of it. Then there’s accuracy: any banned fee still appearing on a statement is now a prohibited charge, and the CCTS is tracking and reporting on exactly these complaints. There’s refund logic too, because a fee charged in error after June 12 has to be caught and credited cleanly, before it becomes its own complaint. And on top of all that, a separate CRTC ruling in April added a new job. When a customer changes or cancels through an app, online, or by email, you have to send written confirmation, usually a system-generated message. So at the very moment customers can walk away for free, you owe them more transparent Customer Billing communications than you did before.
None of this is hard when your communications can change fast. It gets painful when every template tweak needs a developer and a six-week queue. The carriers that handled June 12 cleanly were the ones that could update what they tell customers quickly and get it right the first time. The ones still trading letters with the CRTC couldn’t.
So here’s the question worth asking before the next rule lands, and there’s always a next rule. How fast can you change what your bills and messages say, and how confident are you they’re right when they go out?
At Fast Movn, a Canadian software company based in BC, that’s what hiperCCM is for: agile Customer Billing communications you can update quickly and trust to be accurate, even when the rules move under you. If June 12 had you scrambling, Request a Demo (https://fastmovn.com/en/home/#request-a-demo).
