It's Moving Day for Your Consumer Rights

The CRTC is merging its four consumer rulebooks into one. Mergers sound boring on purpose. But moving day is when you find out what got packed, what got labelled, and what quietly never left the old apartment — and nobody sends a press release about the box that goes missing.

Why You Have Four Rulebooks

Your cellphone rights live in the Wireless Code, written after a wave of national fury about three-year contracts and roaming bills. Your internet rights live in the Internet Code, drafted years later. Home phone has the Deposit and Disconnection Code. Your TV service has the Television Service Provider Code. Four documents, written at four different moments, in response to four different scandals.

Nobody designed the set. It accreted. Which is how you ended up with rights that depend on which service you are arguing about — even though you probably buy all four from the same company, on the same bill, in the same bundle.

Merging them into one Consumer Protection Code is a genuinely good idea. It is also the most consequential consumer proceeding in a decade, for a reason the word “harmonization” is doing its best to hide.

In a Merge, Every Protection Re-Applies for Its Job

Combining four rulebooks forces a decision on every clause. Does this rule now apply to everything? Does it stay attached to the one service it was written for? Does it survive at all? The Commission has said, explicitly, that it will examine whether service-specific protections should extend across all retail services. That sentence is the whole ballgame.

Play it forward. If a gap gets closed, millions of customers gain a right overnight. If a gap merely gets reprinted in nicer formatting, it stops being a historical accident and becomes a decision — considered once, kept, and locked in until the next harmonization, which is to say a decade or more.

The proceeding is framed as part of a federal Red Tape Review: streamline, simplify, reduce administrative burden. All legitimate. Also worth noticing: that is the vocabulary in which a merger gets presented as neutral, and no merger is neutral. Someone decides what makes the trip.

Exhibit A: the Rule About Things You Never Ordered

The Commission published a Working Document — a draft of the merged code. In it there is a provision headed Unsolicited services: a provider must not charge for any device or service the account holder has not expressly purchased. Reasonable. Unremarkable. You would assume it was universal.

It comes from the Wireless Code and the Internet Code. The Television Service Provider Code has never had an equivalent. And the television provisions carried into the draft are all written in terms of what the customer selected — what you selected must be disclosed, what you selected must be priced, what you selected may be removed.

Now follow the thread, because this is where it gets sneaky without anyone being a villain. A service your provider drops into the package by default was never selected. Never selected means never disclosed, never itemized, never separately priced — and whether you can remove it is anyone's guess. You pay monthly for something you cannot name, cannot price, and cannot decline.

There is a term for that: negative-option billing. Supplied and billed unless you refuse it. The catch, of course, is that you cannot refuse what you were never told about.

What One Subscriber Put on the Record

Interventions closed 14 August, after a three-day extension consumer groups asked for. Among the filings is one from this site's author, filing personally, and its ask fits in a sentence: apply the unsolicited-services rule to television, and make three things true so the rule can breathe.

1. Tell me. At the point of sale, say which services are in the package by default and whether they can be declined.
2. Price it. Put the service and its monthly amount in the contract and the Critical Information Summary — the one-page document that is supposed to say what you are buying.
3. Let me say no. Removal without forfeiting more than the service costs — no fee, no quietly vaporized bundle discount worth more than the service itself.

Just as deliberate is what was not asked: no ban on bundling, no rate-setting, no ruling on which channels get carried, no obligations on any programming service. Providers can keep building packages however they like. The ask is three verbs.

A companion procedural request asked the Commission to put questions to the largest TV ownership groups, because of a fact that deserves a moment of appreciation: nobody outside the industry can currently say which services are included by default across Canada, how many people pay for them, or what happens when someone asks to remove one. “What am I paying for?” is, at national scale, an open research question. In 2026. That request awaits a ruling.

You've Seen This Shape Before

If you read our other coverage, the pattern will feel familiar. The rule requiring providers to tell you the complaints commission exists? Wireless Code and Internet Code — not the TV code. The rule against billing you for things you never bought? Same two codes, same gap. The 1,010-licence list with one stowaway? Same lesson from a different direction. Meanwhile the telecom side of the ledger has spent three years collecting a coherent set of consumer protections.

Television keeps ending up in the gaps, and not because anyone is twirling a moustache. Gaps persist where nobody is looking, and TV subscribers have never had an organized constituency looking. The merge is the moment that gap either closes or gets laminated.

The Good News: This One Comes With a Public Hearing

On 30 November 2026, the Commission opens a public hearing in Gatineau. You can attend in person or watch online. The interventions are being posted to the public record now, which means you can read exactly what your provider asked the new code to say — an underrated genre of Canadian literature. A reply phase follows, and the decision lands in 2027. Whatever is in it is what you get, probably for a decade.

The intervention window here has closed. But if reading this produced any feeling of “wait, that is not how it should work,” two comment windows are open right now, and both are the real thing:

• Device, SIM and setup fees (TNoC 2026-155) — the three national carriers must show cause why their new fees do not violate the switching-fee ban. Open until 31 August 2026.
• CCTS awareness (BTNoC 2025-274) — whether providers must tell you the complaints body exists, and whether TV customers finally get that right too. Written process, no lawyer, no hearing, anyone may file. Open until 7 October 2026. Our explainer covers what to say.

Both live on the consultation tracker. The how-to-intervene guide takes you through the form in plain language, and the email list will tell you when the next window opens. Rooms where nobody shows up produce the rules you would expect. Show up.

Further Reading

• Broadcasting and Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2026-134 — the notice, the Working Document (Appendix 1), and the questions (Appendix 2)
• BTNoC CRTC 2026-134-1 — the deadline extension to 14 August
• How to intervene in a CRTC proceeding — the plain-language guide