Telus to Impose 1.5% Credit Card Fees

Bad news broke on September 16, 2022, when many Telus customers received an email stating that they’ll be charged a 1.5% service fee for using a credit card to pay their phone bill as of October 17, 2022. 

This is a highly anti-consumer policy that serves only to line the pockets of the Canadian telecom giants, who are already some of the most overpaid in the entire world.

Even worse? These fees could set a dangerous precedent going forward for all Canadians who use any type of recurring subscription service.

Yet Another Telecom Fee

Canadians already pay some of the highest prices for cell phone services on the planet. It’s therefore baffling that an huge company such as Telus – which by the way is enormously profitable – would sue Visa and Mastercard over their interchange fees… and yet, that’s exactly what Telus did.

And they won, too. This 1.5% surcharge (plus GST) on top of your phone bill represents the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) siding with the our telecom giants, in that interchange fees can be passed onto the end consumer of telecom services.

That’s why you’ll be paying the surcharge from October 17, 2022.

To add insult to injury, Telus didn’t even bother changing the header from “lorem ipsum” standard typeset.

Telus’s budget-oriented brand, Koodo, won’t be levying the fee, but to me it feels like this is only a matter of time. Similarly, Visa- and Mastercard-branded debit cards are exempt, as are prepaid credit cards – for now.

I suspect this first fee is just an initial step toward normalizing this type of surcharge, and it will not be the last.

Funnily enough, consumer protection laws are working as intended in Quebec, where this fee cannot be legally levied.

Maybe the rest of the country should catch up, because having the other 12 provinces and territories of our great nation subject to yet more price-gouging by these enormously successful cell phone giants isn’t fair.

Why Credit Card Surcharges Are Anti-Customer

Telus’s assertion that the credit card interchange fees are too high is bogus, because every other business in Canada has to pay these same fees.

Accommodations for interchange fees are already built into the final price of any good or service you purchase, including Telus’s cellular service packages.

Therefore, levying a 1.5% fee is designed solely to try and incentivize you to drop…