Category: Opinions

By Harold Phillips | March 2026

Last November, I was helping my cousin set up internet at her new apartment in Mississauga. She'd just moved from Berlin, where she'd been paying €25 a month for symmetrical gigabit fibre. We pulled up Rogers and Bell together. I watched her face cycle through confusion, then disbelief, then that flat look people get when they've decided to just accept something terrible. We found her a TekSavvy plan at $65 a month for 500 Mbps. She called it "not terrible." I tried to explain that, for Canada, it actually wasn't.

Canadian internet is expensive. Not "slightly more than ideal" expensive. Genuinely, embarrassingly, internationally-documented expensive. We pay more per megabit than most of the developed world, we get less infrastructure investment than comparable countries, and every few years there's a regulatory hearing that generates press releases and changes almost nothing. This has been going on for decades. At some point, "the market will fix it" stops being optimism and starts being a punchline.

The Problem

We have three big providers — Rogers, Bell, and Telus — who collectively control the vast majority of the country's internet infrastructure. They built those networks decades ago, often with public subsidies and spectrum licences that cost a fraction of what they'd cost today. That infrastructure is now the moat. If you want to offer internet to Canadians, you either own a piece of that infrastructure or you lease it from someone who does.

The CRTC is supposed to regulate that lease process. The theory is that smaller independent ISPs can buy wholesale access to the Big Three's networks and offer competitive prices. TekSavvy, Distributel, Vmedia. That's the model. And it works, sort of, in the sense that you can pay less by using an indie ISP than by going direct to Rogers or Bell. But the wholesale rates are set by the CRTC, and the CRTC has spent years flip-flopping on what those rates should actually be.

In 2019, the CRTC issued lower wholesale rates that would have made independent ISPs meaningfully cheaper. Then, in 2021, they reversed course. The big providers appealed, the government sent it back for review, and the whole thing dragged on. The indie ISPs that had expanded based on the 2019 rates had to walk back pricing. Some didn't survive.

That's the problem in a sentence: the people who set the rules keep changing the rules in ways that favour the people who own the infrastructure.

My Take

Here's the thing. I don't actually buy the "Canada is big and cold and infrastructure is expensive" argument. Not fully.

Yes, geographic density matters. Stringing fibre to 50 farms spread across 200 kilometres of northern Ontario is harder than wiring a European city. I get that. But when you look at countries like Australia, which has similar density challenges and a similar history of privatised telecoms, they managed to build a national broadband network with mandatory wholesale access. It wasn't perfect (the NBN rollout had real problems) but the political will existed to treat internet as infrastructure. Here, it doesn't.

The density argument also falls apart when you look at Canadian cities. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver. These are dense, urban markets. Rogers and Bell have no geography excuse in the 416. And yet here we are, paying $90 a month for 1 Gbps when you can get that for a fraction of the cost in comparable US cities, let alone European ones.

I'll be real with you: I think this is a regulatory capture story dressed up as a geography story. The Big Three have spent decades and considerable money making sure the rules favour their position. That's not a conspiracy. It's just how large incumbents work. They hire the same people who used to work at the CRTC. They fund the think tanks. They commission the economic reports that say wholesale access would "reduce network investment." The independent research mostly says the opposite. But that research doesn't have a lobbying budget.

What I've Seen

I was paying $89 a month to Rogers for 500 Mbps until late 2022. I'd been on that plan for three years. Hadn't checked prices in a while. Hadn't thought about it.

Then one Sunday I got one of those "your bill is increasing by $5 next month" emails. I opened it, looked at my bill, and realized I'd been on autopilot so long I'd just assumed this was what internet cost. I spent about an hour comparing plans and switched to TekSavvy at $60 a month for the same speed. My partner thought I was overreacting when I was visibly annoyed about it ("it's $29 a month, Harold") but that's $348 a year. And I'd already been overpaying for three years. Do that math and it's over a thousand dollars in fees for what, exactly. The right to pay Rogers directly.

The switch itself was completely uneventful. The speeds are identical. TekSavvy uses Rogers infrastructure in Toronto anyway. I'm literally on the same physical network. The only thing that changed is I'm not paying Rogers' margin on top of the wholesale cost.

That's the part that actually gets to me. There's nothing special about Rogers internet. They didn't build a better network for residential customers — they built the network and then charged whatever they wanted because there wasn't meaningful competition. When a regulated wholesale option forced prices down, they appealed the decision. And they mostly won.

The Other Side

The counterargument you'll hear from the Big Three (and from some economists who study telecoms) is that capping wholesale rates reduces the incentive to invest in new infrastructure. If Rogers knows that any fibre it builds can immediately be resold by TekSavvy at regulated rates, why build more?

It's a real tension. I'm not going to pretend it isn't.

But I'd push back on a few things. First, the Big Three haven't historically underinvested in infrastructure when required to provide wholesale access. They've continued to expand networks because they need to remain competitive in the business and enterprise markets regardless of what happens in residential. Second, in countries with strong wholesale access mandates, you tend to see more infrastructure investment over the long run, not less, because competition forces everyone to keep up.

And third, honestly, these are not companies that need our sympathy. Rogers posted billions in profit in 2024. Bell has returned enormous value to shareholders while cutting thousands of jobs. Telus keeps raising residential prices while expanding into agriculture tech and home security. These aren't scrappy startups looking for capital to build out their networks. They're entrenched incumbents protecting margin.

I'm not saying the solution is simple. I'm saying "but what about their investment incentives" is not a persuasive reason to keep paying $90 a month for internet that costs half that in comparable markets.

Where This Leaves Us

My cousin is still on TekSavvy. She's stopped complaining about the price. Or rather, she's moved on to asking me about the Rogers-Shaw merger and what it means for competition in Ontario long-term, which is a longer conversation than I want to have on a weeknight.

Practically speaking: if you're on a plan from one of the Big Three, check what the indie ISPs in your area are charging. TekSavvy, Vmedia, Distributel: availability depends on where you live, but in most Ontario and Quebec markets there's something. You'll often get the same speeds on the same physical infrastructure for meaningfully less. The savings aren't dramatic in every case, but $29 a month adds up, and you're not getting anything extra by paying it to Rogers.

The systemic problem isn't going anywhere fast. The CRTC will keep being a battleground. The Big Three will keep funding the argument that they need protection to invest in Canada's future. The government will keep announcing broadband strategies that take longer to ship than promised.

I don't have a policy prescription here. I'm an IT project manager, not a regulator. But I do know that "this is just how things are in Canada" gets said about a lot of things that used to be different and could be different again. The internet is infrastructure. Most of us treat it that way in practice. We'd sooner give up cable TV than our home connection. It's past time the policy caught up.

It just hasn't yet.

This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience and observations. Telecom pricing, ISP availability, and regulatory decisions change frequently, so do your own research before switching providers.

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By Harold Phillips | March 2026

Every few months, a journalist or a Reddit thread publishes a "can you afford to live in Toronto?" piece and the number is always either terrifying or suspiciously manageable depending on what the author is trying to prove. My partner reads them and shows me the ones that make me look either irresponsible or delusional. Either way I lose. So I stopped reading them and started writing my own.

Here's what I actually spend in a month. Real numbers from a spreadsheet I've been keeping since 2021. Not a theoretical budget, not a lifestyle blog approximation. The number is higher than I expected when I first added it up, and it's higher now than it was three years ago. But it's not the apocalyptic figure the hot-take articles keep citing. It's just money going somewhere.

The Problem With Toronto Affordability Takes

There's a specific kind of content I've come to hate. It usually goes one of two ways.

The first version is the "I live in Toronto on $27,000 a year and here's how I do it" story, which always involves eating rice six days a week, two roommates in a Scarborough apartment, and framing financial precarity as a charming personality quirk.

The second version is the "$200,000 salary and I still can't afford a house" piece. Technically true, but doing a lot of work to make a six-figure income sound like victimhood.

Neither of these is where most people actually are. I'm somewhere in the middle: comfortably renting, taking the TTC, shopping at No Frills, not suffering, and I never see my life reflected in those pieces. So I started writing it down myself.

My Take

The thesis I've landed on after years of tracking this: Toronto is genuinely expensive, but the discourse around it is almost useless for people who aren't at either extreme. The real cost of living here depends almost entirely on whether you're splitting expenses with someone, and most of the hot takes conveniently skip that part.

I'll be real with you: I would not be living in Leslieville on my income alone. Not comfortably. A one-bedroom in this neighbourhood would run close to $2,500 in rent by myself, and that's before I've bought a single bag of lentils. Single renters in Toronto — especially under 35 — are dealing with a genuinely rough situation that couples and multi-person households don't fully experience. My numbers look manageable because there are two incomes in this apartment.

That's not a budgeting tip. It's a structural reality most Toronto affordability content glosses over.

The Actual Numbers

My partner and I rent a one-bedroom in Leslieville. We've been here since 2022. Our rent is $2,350 a month. Not a steal for this neighbourhood in 2026, but our landlord hasn't gone full AGI on us yet, which apparently counts as luck these days.

Here's what a typical month looks like for our household:

My share of shared expenses comes to roughly $1,900 a month. Add personal spending (clothes, whatever I'm researching for three weeks before I buy, the occasional Uber when the TTC has one of its moments) and I'm usually between $2,400 and $2,700 for the month.

Annualized, my personal spend is around $30,000 to $32,000. That's before RRSP contributions and TFSA deposits. After all of that, it's tight, but it works.

What I've Actually Done About It

The non-rent stuff is where I've put most of my energy, because it's the only category I can actually control.

Switching to Fizz saved me around $50 a month compared to Freedom Mobile, and Freedom was already cheaper than Rogers, Bell, or Telus by a significant margin. Switching to Oxio for home internet saved another $30 from whatever Bell was extracting previously. That's $80 a month, nearly $1,000 a year, from refusing to pay for a logo on a bill.

Groceries are No Frills and mostly meal-prepped. Dal, roasted vegetables, rice, a curry on Sundays. My partner is the better cook. Beans mostly eats better than we do, which is probably a comment on our priorities.

The eating-out line is where things slip. $280 a month sounds like a lot for someone who lectures himself about telecom fees, and it is. But I'm not cutting it. That's birthday dinners and bad weeks and the coffee I pick up on the way to the TTC because I left the house too late to make one. That number is real and it's staying.

The subscriptions audit I do every few months genuinely helps. I found $23 worth of monthly charges last autumn that I couldn't immediately identify. Cancelled two of them. The third turned out to be something my partner was actively using, which I heard about for a while.

The Other Side

The counterargument to "here's what I spend" pieces is that they're useless. Everyone's situation is different, rent can double overnight with an AGI application, one medical emergency or job loss and the whole thing unravels.

That's fair. These numbers only work under specific conditions: two stable incomes, good health, stable rent, no car, no kids. Change any of those variables and the math shifts fast. I'm not presenting my spreadsheet as a blueprint for anyone.

The other thing people say is "well, you should be buying, not renting." My partner and I have done that math more than once. I'm genuinely not sure we've modelled it correctly (real estate involves a lot of assumptions about appreciation rates and interest rates that I can't predict) but based on what I've worked out, buying in Toronto right now is not obviously better than renting at our income level. You have to gut the TFSA for a down payment, carry costs at current rates aren't trivial, and the opportunity cost of not investing the difference is real. Maybe I'm wrong. The "renting is throwing money away" crowd never seems to account for what you're throwing away to own.

I'll revisit that math every year. Haven't changed my mind yet.

Where This Leaves Us

I don't have a fix for Toronto's housing market. Nobody does, and I'm suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.

What I can say is that $30,000 a year in personal spending is my actual number. The cost of being a renter with a partner and a cat in this city in 2026. It's not a triumph of frugality. It's not a cautionary tale. It's just what comfortable looks like here. And comfortable, for me, means No Frills groceries, an MVNO phone plan, and not auditing every coffee.

The part that still gets me is rent. Not because $2,350 is objectively ruinous (it's not) but because it went up $175 last year and the year before that, and there's no reason to believe that stops. Every other line item in that budget I can chip away at. Rent is the variable I can't touch, and every year it takes a bigger percentage of the total.

That's the actual Toronto affordability story. Not the $200,000 victim narrative. Not the ramen-and-roommates hustle piece. Just: the rent is too high, the rest is manageable if you're not doing it alone, and most of what you read about this city is designed to make you feel either panicked or impressed.

Neither of those feelings is useful.

This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience. Your situation might be different, so do your own research.