Click to Cancel: Why Canada Needs to Catch Up

Earlier today I tried to cancel a TV service I’d signed up for entirely through an app. Setup was seamless - download, click, confirm, and boom, I had live TV faster than Shane Bieber exercised his player option with the Jays. But when it came time to cancel? That required calling a real person, sitting on hold, verifying my identity, and politely declining a series of “special retention offers” for services I didn’t want. The whole ordeal took over 20 minutes. While 20 minutes doesn't seem like a lot, I kept putting the call off knowing it wouldn't be an enjoyable experience.

Another time, I tried to cancel a $10/month backup internet stick I’d bought during the 2021 Rogers outage. Four years later, I realized I’d paid nearly $500 for a service I hadn’t touched. Through the providers portal I could order new services, upgrade the existing plan, and even buy a new cell phone but no option to cancel. When I finally got around to making that call, the cancellation process took me half an hour and included multi-factor authentication via email, a customer rep handoff, and more upsell pitches than a late-night infomercial.

Both experiences left me thinking the same thing: why is signing up frictionless but canceling feels like filing your taxes over the phone?

The Friction Is the Feature

Let’s be honest: this isn’t an accident. The industry has mastered the art of making onboarding easy and offboarding painful. Every extra minute you spend on hold, every hoop you jump through, is a deliberate design choice aimed at reducing churn.

It’s what behavioral economists call "sludge" - friction designed to discourage users from taking an action that hurts the company’s bottom line. Want to cancel? Suddenly, that sleek app that onboarded you in seconds becomes a black hole of policy and process. (As an aside, Freakonomics has a great mini-series on Sludge you should totally check out)

In a world where Canadians can open a bank account, buy crypto, or order a car online, it’s absurd that canceling a $10 internet plan still requires waiting in a queue for a human gatekeeper.

And it’s not just inconvenient — it’s anti-competitive. Friction to exit means less consumer mobility, fewer people shopping around, and ultimately higher prices.

The U.S. “Click to Cancel” Rule: A Simple, Smart Fix

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission recently passed what’s colloquially called the “click to cancel” rule. It’s refreshingly simple: if a business lets you sign up for a service online, it must also let you cancel online — in the same number of steps (or fewer).

That means no more phone marathons, no “please call us to confirm,” and no upsell traps disguised as “confirmation steps.” You click to start, you click to stop.

It’s a rule built on a principle most of us already apply to technology: symmetry. If setup is automated, teardown should be too. We’d never tolerate a software installer that required a fax to uninstall, yet that’s effectively how telecom still treats its customers.

Canada Should Do the Same

It’s time for Canada to adopt similar “click to cancel” standards. The CRTC has long regulated fair treatment for consumers — from contract clarity to number portability — but cancellation friction remains an unaddressed gap.

Technically, the fix is trivial. Any provider that can authenticate a customer online can let them cancel online. Verification, confirmation, and record-keeping can all be done securely through the same systems that already handle billing and account management.

This isn’t about punishing providers; it’s about aligning incentives. When companies know that customers can leave easily, they’re motivated to deliver better service and transparent pricing to keep them. That’s how real competition works.

Closing the Loop

In a well-run network, bad packets get dropped automatically - not routed through a human to beg for a retry. The same principle should apply to customer choice: if I no longer want a service, I should be able to drop it cleanly and efficiently.

Until Canadian regulators step in, we’ll keep seeing the same pattern: friction where it benefits providers, and convenience only where it benefits sales.

We can do better. Let’s make "click to cancel" the new standard. After all, good service should earn loyalty — not trap it.