How to Unlock a Cell Phone in Canada

Often you do not, and TechBrotherz will tell you that before taking your money. Under the CRTC Wireless Code, as revised in Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2017-200, every mobile device sold in Canada on or after 1 December 2017 must be provided to the customer already unlocked. For devices sold before that date, carriers must unlock them free of charge when the customer asks.

So if the phone is on your own account with a Canadian carrier, the first call should be to that carrier, not to a repair store. It costs nothing and it is your right. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed or hoping you are.

Paid unlocking exists for the situations that rule does not reach. A phone bought secondhand from someone whose account you cannot access, a phone brought in from another country where no Canadian rule applies, a phone from a carrier that no longer operates, or a device where the original account holder is simply not contactable. Those are the cases where paying solves a problem that a phone call cannot.

A phone that has been reported lost or stolen is blacklisted on the national IMEI database that Canadian carriers share. A blacklisted phone cannot be unlocked by TechBrotherz, by any other shop, or by the carrier itself, and it will not work on a Canadian network regardless of what SIM goes in it. If a secondhand phone will not activate, this is the most common reason.

A phone with an outstanding balance or an unpaid device financing agreement is a related case. The carrier can refuse to unlock it until the account is settled, and that is a billing matter rather than a technical one.

An Iphone locked to someone else's Apple Account through Activation Lock is a different restriction entirely, and unlocking will not help. Only the original owner can remove that, by signing the device out of their account. We check for both of these before you pay, because we would rather you kept the money than paid for something that cannot work.

Carrier unlocking, which this page covers, removes a network restriction. A phone stuck at a Google account verification screen after a factory reset is a different lock entirely: Factory Reset Protection, an ownership protection rather than a carrier one. TechBrotherz handles that as its own service, with proof of ownership required, and its page explains what it can and cannot do.

The two are easy to confuse because both stop a phone being used. The test is what the phone is asking for. A phone that works but rejects another carrier's SIM needs a carrier unlock. A phone that will not finish setting up until a previous Google account signs in needs FRP removal, which is a different job with different rules.

Forgotten screen locks sit in the same family as FRP: an ownership protection the Store will only ever remove for a device that can be shown to be yours. Ask at the Store, and bring what proof you have.