Financial Post stringer 2017 to 2022. Consumer protection beat since 2022. Has filed PIPEDA complaints herself, as research. Knows FCAC, OBSI, and OMVIC procedures from the inside. Fluent in loan documentation, credit bureau mechanics, and collection law.
Beats: banking, consumer finance, auto loans, credit reporting, PIPEDA
Contact: a.bergeron@printmag.org
A collector can ask you to pay. A collector cannot harass you, call at any hour, or talk to your boss. Ontario law draws hard lines. Here is where they are, and how to make a collector communicate only in writing.
Your employer sends the government your income. Your bank sends it your interest. The agency already holds the slips it makes you copy back to it under threat of penalty. The technology to simply tell people what they owe, or are owed, exists and is already running for two million Canadians. The default is backwards. Make it automatic. Let the civilian dispute the number, or not. Simple.
A hard inquiry on your credit file lowers your score and is supposed to require your consent. If one appears that you did not authorize, you have concrete steps: dispute it, demand removal, and file a privacy complaint. This is general information, not legal or financial advice.
She agreed to an eighty-four month auto loan at $500.40 a month. When she arrived to take the keys, the loan on the desk was seventy-two months at $571.48 a month. The keys were in sight. The dealer was waiting. Nobody had called to say the terms had changed. She signed. Three months later, when she asked the bank to explain the difference, it sent a repossession truck.
Between November 2025 and May 2026, a major Canadian chartered bank ran a hard credit inquiry on a consumer's file six times. The consumer had not applied for any product. The consumer had not authorized any inquiry. Each hard pull lowered the credit score. When the consumer asked the bank to explain and remove the inquiries, the bank sent a letter. The letter thanked him for raising his concern. The six inquiries remained.
A Canadian consumer, reviewing her credit file for the first time in two years, finds six hard inquiries from a major chartered bank she has not recently applied to for anything. Each hard inquiry is, by every credit bureau's published scoring methodology, a negative event on the consumer's file. The bank, when asked, produces a standard letter. The letter does not explain what the six inquiries were for. The letter thanks the consumer for raising her concern. The six inquiries remain.
A consumer negotiates and agrees to an eighty-four-month auto loan at a Brampton dealership. The consumer signs the purchase agreement at that term. On delivery day, the day the consumer takes possession of the vehicle, the finance office presents a new contract for the same vehicle at a seventy-two-month term. The monthly payment is higher. The total interest is higher. The consumer, with the keys already in sight, signs. The country has no specific requirement that compels a dealer to honour the loan term the consumer originally agreed to.
A Canadian citizen is wronged by a bank. The citizen files a complaint with the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada. The FCAC accepts the complaint, investigates, and issues a finding. The bank reads the finding and responds with a letter. The citizen, months later, has the finding and the letter. The bank has its original policy, unchanged. This is the country's consumer-protection architecture. It is made of acronyms. The acronyms are not, in any operational sense that matters to the citizen, effective.
A national bank lends a citizen the price of a car. The citizen falls one payment behind. A tow truck arrives at five in the morning. There is no letter. There is no phone call. There is no escalation. There is, in the legislation that supposedly governs this transaction, a duty of good faith that the bank has not, in any meaningful operational sense, observed. The country has, in the absence of a regulator brave enough to enforce the duty, allowed the bank's repossession practice to become its own quiet industry.
Ontario law requires every driver to buy auto insurance from a small set of large companies that compete with each other on advertising and on almost nothing else. The price, in the cities where the country's driving actually happens, is now higher than the monthly payment on the car. The arrangement is, in plain English, a mandatory tax administered by private firms. The country has, on its own ledger, no excuse for it.
A senior in Ontario requests a ten-thousand-dollar withdrawal from her registered retirement income fund. The withdrawal is administered by a national insurance company whose name the country knows. The withdrawal takes seven months. Eleven documented failures. False assertions about connection issues. A son holding power of attorney. A statement of claim now in court. The country built a private retirement system. The private retirement system, on this file, does not work.
Overdraft is a tax on poverty, dressed in cufflinks. Repossession-without-warning is a violation of every principle of consumer protection most countries have written into law, written here only on a brochure. And the loan whose terms shift between the dealership floor and the financing desk is the small, perfectly engineered cruelty that the Big Five cannot, when actually questioned, defend. They have not been questioned in a long time. They should be.
In the spring of 2020 the government pushed money out the door fast to keep people fed and housed through a sudden shutdown, and told them not to worry about the paperwork yet. Then the letters came. The Canada Emergency Response Benefit kept the country standing, and for some of the most precarious people who took it, often following the government's own unclear instructions, it became a debt.
