In 2025, it is absurd that cancelling a subscription to the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star still means picking up a phone, sitting on hold, and enduring a retention agent’s long-winded pitch about why you should stay. The same story plays out when trying to leave your internet or television provider, the friction isn’t an accident. It is a deliberate business process designed to exhaust you into compliance.
In an age when the “appification” of commerce has transformed consumer expectations, this model isn’t just archaic, it’s actively destructive to the Canadian marketplace. In the United States, cancelling a service like Netflix, Disney+, or Spotify is as simple as opening the app, hitting a single button, and confirming. Amazon Prime members can end their subscriptions in seconds without ever speaking to a human. Apple’s App Store requires that all subscription-based apps include a one-click cancel option inside the iOS settings. The result? The consumer retains full control over their spending and their experience.
Canada’s media and telecom industries have made a choice to do the opposite. They’ve built moats not with better products, but with bureaucratic friction. This isn’t about loyalty. It’s about attrition – the attrition of consumer will. If you have to spend an hour cancelling a newspaper subscription, you will think twice before ever signing up again. In that way, Canadian companies are scaring off the very people who might otherwise return. 
The psychology is straightforward: potential customers don’t just weigh the price and the product. They also calculate the “exit cost.” If the exit cost is high, many will simply decide not to engage at all. This is especially true for digital natives who have grown up in a world where deleting an app is enough to stop being billed. In Canada, our legacy companies are betting that enough people will forget or give up on cancelling.
This culture of entrapment doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s reinforced by the structural realities of Canadian business, particularly in media and telecom.
The Cartel Effect in Telecom
Anyone who has compared wireless, internet, and TV bills between Canada and other OECD countries has seen the pattern. Prices track closely across providers, promotional offers are nearly identical, and the same service bundles carry eerily similar fine print. We have the illusion of choice, but in practice, our “competition” functions more like a cartel. If Bell, Rogers, and Telus aren’t formally colluding, they’ve at least mastered the art of rapid price triangulation. When one raises a fee or cuts a feature, the others quickly match it.
Under these conditions, there’s little incentive to make cancellation easy, because where else can you go? Even so-called “new entrants” and flanker brands often run on the same infrastructure and operate under the same customer-retention philosophies as their parent companies.
The outcome is predictable: Canadians pay more for less, and when service disappoints, they face the same Kafkaesque gauntlet to leave.
Media’s Perverse Incentives
In the media world, the problem has an added twist. The Carney–Trudeau government’s bailouts to newspapers and broadcasters have made the state, not the paying customer, the most important client. When a sizeable portion of your revenue comes from government subsidies, your business model no longer depends on delighting, or even retaining, subscribers. Instead, it depends on political alignment and satisfying Ottawa’s funding criteria.
This means media companies can afford to ignore modern consumer expectations. Why invest in user-friendly digital subscription management when your cash flow is secured by the public purse? Why adapt to the one-click standards of Apple or Amazon when you can keep your small base of paying subscribers locked in by inertia and resistance to cancellation?
The perverse result: the harder you make it for someone to leave, the longer you can count them as a “subscriber”, even if they resent you for it.
The Appification Gap
Meanwhile, the United States has normalized digital consumer control. Want to cancel your Hulu plan? Done in two clicks. Cancel Audible? The cancellation link is right there in your account settings. Even in industries once notorious for friction, like gyms, there’s growing legal and consumer pressure to make quitting as easy as signing up. California now requires that any online sign-up must be matched by an online cancellation method.
This is not a small cultural difference. The “appification” of commerce has conditioned entire populations to expect immediate service changes at their fingertips. When you contrast that with Canada’s analog-era cancellation culture, the gap is jarring.
American platforms have also learned that making it easy to leave builds trust, and that trust often brings customers back. Someone who has a positive experience cancelling a subscription is more likely to return later, because they know they can leave without hassle if their needs change again.
How Friction Chills Demand
For Canadian media and telecom providers, this resistance to modern cancellation isn’t just anti-consumer; it’s anti-growth. Lock-in culture prevents companies from competing for repeat business because it poisons the well. A frustrated customer isn’t coming back.
Consider the digital subscription economy: people cycle in and out of services based on their needs, budget, and interests. An American might subscribe to HBO for two months to watch a show, cancel, and come back later for another release. In Canada, the thought of having to endure the cancellation process can be enough to prevent someone from signing up in the first place.
The long-term impact is that Canadian companies lose potential customers not to their competitors, but to the memory of their own bad service.
Why This Won’t Get Better on Its Own
Some will argue that consumer demand will eventually force these companies to modernize. But without real competition, that’s wishful thinking. Telecom companies are too insulated by market concentration. Media companies are too cushioned by taxpayer subsidies and protectionism. Neither sector faces the kind of market discipline that would make losing a customer’s trust financially painful.
In fact, the political and economic incentives run in the opposite direction. Ottawa’s ongoing support for “trusted” media brands gives them every reason to maintain a captive audience, not a happy one. And the CRTC’s regulatory framework in telecom has long prioritized “orderly markets” over disruptive, consumer-driven change.
The result is a stable equilibrium of bad service – stable for the providers, that is. For consumers, it’s a dead end.
The Case for One-Click Freedom
What’s needed is a straightforward consumer right: the ability to cancel any subscription online, in one click, using the same platform or app through which it was purchased. This is already standard practice in the app economy. There is no technical barrier to implementing it for newspapers, telecom services, or streaming platforms. The only obstacle is the unwillingness of entrenched industries to give up their hold over consumers.
Such a rule would do more than make life easier for current customers. It would lower the perceived exit cost for potential customers, encouraging them to try products and services they might otherwise avoid. It would also force Canadian companies to compete on product quality and pricing, rather than on their ability to trap people in contracts.
And here’s the deeper benefit: a one-click cancellation standard would expose just how poorly many of our domestic offerings stack up in the global marketplace. If Canadian services had to win over customers who could leave at any moment, they might finally start building experiences worthy of international attention and affection.
Competing for Wallets and Affection
Canada will never have the economies of scale of the U.S. market, but we can still compete on quality, innovation, and customer service. The problem is, our current consumer lock-in culture is the opposite of competitive – it’s defensive and rooted in fear of churn.
If we want our media and telecom sectors to thrive, we need to give consumers the freedom to walk away. That freedom is what keeps companies honest. It’s what forces them to innovate. And it’s what makes them worthy of not just Canadian dollars, but global respect.
Until then, our industries will remain exactly as they are: subsidized and profoundly unambitious. And consumers, the ones who haven’t already sworn off these products entirely, will remain stuck in a maze designed to keep them from leaving.
It’s past time to open the exits.
