CCTS Reports Record 53,195 Telecom Complaints, Up 79% in a Year

Canadians are complaining about their phone, internet and TV providers at a record pace. The Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS) said on Thursday that it received 53,195 complaints in its 2025-26 reporting year, a 79 percent increase from the year before, and described the volume as unprecedented.

The agency accepted 41,235 of those complaints, up 74 percent year over year, and said it resolved 87.2 percent of all concluded complaints. But with demand surging, cases that require conciliation or a full investigation are taking longer than usual, and the CCTS warned processing times may stay elevated as volumes keep climbing.

The numbers extend a steep upward trend. The CCTS accepted 23,647 complaints in 2024-25, itself a record at the time, and its mid-year update showed 19,157 complaints accepted in just the six months from August 2025 to January 2026. The full 2025-26 annual report, with provider breakdowns and issue trends, will be published on January 13, 2027.

The timing is hard to ignore. Earlier this week, iPhone in Canada reported that Telus asked the CRTC to order the CCTS to turn away complaints from customers who cannot prove they escalated their issue to a higher level of support first. With complaint volumes nearly doubling in a single year, any new barrier to filing would land on far more Canadians than it would have twelve months ago.

For anyone thinking of filing, the CCTS says you must first give your provider a reasonable opportunity to fix the problem, which it notes is often the fastest route to a resolution anyway. Its advice: explain the problem clearly and say what you want done, keep copies of bills, contracts and correspondence, record the dates and names from every contact, and take part in reasonable resolution steps such as troubleshooting or waiting for a promised credit to appear on your bill.