I fully support your cause and have witnessed this as well. I looked into it briefly and I believe your best avenues are:
* CRTC http://crtc.gc.ca/eng/ * Competition Bureau http://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/
Where complaints can be made re: competitive pricing and misleading advertisements.
See also: http://www.ipvancouverblog.com/canadiancompetitionlaw-abuseo...
Good luck!
Openmedia is an advocacy group that is very active and has a handful of modest successes under its belt. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMedia.ca
Another good resource for keeping informed is through the site of law professor Michael Geist. I should note that his focus is a little more on copyright law. http://www.michaelgeist.ca
If you live in western Canada, Lightspeed is beacon of hope.
http://www.lightspeed.ca/personal/ratesadsl.html#table
Cost comparison:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Edmonton/comments/4dtjt1/internet_s...
The other issue with Canadian telecom is that certain companies are essentially given a government monopoly in certain areas. Where I live, cogeco provides cable Internet and Bell DSL. However, in the next city Rogers does cable and another does DSL. The logic is that one company owns one line and does maintnence on it. Also encourages companies to raise prices and decrease service since you have no other choice.
As for cell phones, it comes down to competition. I know that Saskatchewan as saskatel and the offerings from Rogers, Bell Telus used to be half of what you would pay on other provinces (haven't checked this lately).
Very, very little. The CRTC and the Competition Bureau are the relevant political bodies if you feel like trying.
I pay $79.99 CAD/month for 250Mb/20Mb with no data cap (I have pushed this to extremes, there is no hidden cap) from Rogers. I'm pretty happy with it.
Telecom has always been a cabal in Canada, predating the Internet. Good luck trying to change it.
Bell is required to lease out its lines, so if you're in an area with a good DSL connection, check out TekSavvy[1] who have very good reviews[2]. You are still subject to Bell occasionally being dicks, but it's better than paying Bell directly.
I've been with Wind Mobile for years (unlimited everything for $40/month), but I've got tired of not having service when I really needed it. Now that I have an online business, I can't afford to be offline every time I drive out of town. I'm moving to Rogers and going to pay more than double for 5GB of data.
https://oyyo.ca provides beta testers with a telephone number in exchange for feedback. Runs on WiFi or with a tablet data plan from Rogers or Bell.
Just wanted to say thanks to everybody for the great feedback! I'm really glad I turned to HN for this.
Some people mentioned OpenMedia, who happen to be based in Vancouver where I am, so I'm planning on giving them a shout soon.
As for the CRTC, I spent a bit of time looking them up and I have to admit it didn't make me feel particularly confident in their ability to make anything happen. That said, I'm happy to be proven wrong.
Again, thank you all, I'm hopeful something can be done.
If you are lucky enough to live in an area with any kind of competition, choose them over the incumbents. You should choose them even of they provide worse speeds or less comprehensive customer service. Ideally you should choose a fully independent ISP that doesn't lease any infrastructure from the incumbents.
As a litigious american immgrant, I've been able to mitigate my costs with counter-claims.
Every time the price goes up, I send their CFO a bill for the yearly difference of my charges. After the second notice, when the CFO has defaulted and is now personally liable for a lien, I get a polite letter from someone else in the company saying that my bill has been "credited for mistaken charges."
When my bandwidth goes down, I bill them back for the adjusted bandwidth. same song and dance, and the bandwidth shoots up again after an "upgrade on your node was completed".
In short, I've had a 100Mbit connection with Shaw for 4 years now, with (almost) no outages for $70/month.