While Rogers may still be suffering the reputational blow of the massive service outage that left millions without phone and internet back in July, another of Canada's telecom giants is now facing blowback from the public for a completely different reason.

It has been revealed that Telus is among the first companies planning to charge customers credit card processing fees — fees that are traditionally the responsibility of the business accepting credit payments— as the result of a recent class-action lawsuit.

@TELUS your email telling that credit card payments will now have 1.5% surcharge to cover processing fees is informative - i notice your profits have been substantial. And paying by credit card has been fine for years. Maybe use those profits to do some QA on your comms. pic.twitter.com/hUFchtBe6f

— KCal (@K2Cal) September 19, 2022

The case challenged existing rules that prevent merchants from tacking on surcharges to compensate for these "interchage fees" they accrue for credit transactions, and it eventually determined that businesses can indeed pass them down to consumers as of October 6.

Telus has thus proposed a fee of 1.5 per cent of the payment amount, plus taxes, for home and mobility users who choose to pre-pay or make a one-time payment by card, citing the settlement in a filing to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) in August.

The new fee will start appearing on bills on October 17, per a Telus email, and residents are already taking issue with the idea — a total of nearly 4,000, according to the the comments submitted in opposition to the CRTC filing — though the provider has assured customers that the surcharge is "not higher than the fee Telus pays to accept credit card payments."

It also says its request to the CRTC is "just and reasonable."

Hey @TELUS @TELUSsupport this email about raising prices under the guise of a credit card surcharge is BS and you should be ashamed of your terrible service toward “valued” customers. This is just a cash grab, and @CRTCeng is doing nothing to protect us from this near-monopoly! pic.twitter.com/vtaS6EciZy

— ye olde burner account (@__Eimhin__) September 17, 2022

Tensions are especially high after the Rogers outage that showed just how reliant cities and people's livelihoods are on a select few providers, and given that Canada has some of the highest wireless bills in the world.

Customers should expect that other good and services may soon also be increasing as a result of the ruling.