In Canada, phone locking has been banned since 2017, with free unlocking being available to phones purchased before that. You can still get cheaper/free phones

In Canada, phone locking has been banned since 2017, with free unlocking being available to phones purchased before that. You can still get cheaper/free phones with your plan, but it won't be locked to that carrier, that would be silly. It's over a contract of some defined length, and you're bound by the contract to pay for whatever value's left of the phone if you cancel. If you paid for that phone by being subscribed to your carrier for that length of time (say, 2 years), why wouldn't you be able to take that phone elsewhere? You've already paid for it, it's yours. There's also been a trend (I don't know whether it's legislated or not) for phones to be explicitly $X/mo for 24 months (though that still ends up being far below retail, and is sometimes $0), instead of burying that in the plan costs. We still have plenty of problems with ridiculous plan pricing and data limitations, but those have gotten better, and were still bad before carrier locking went away.