Honestly I’m not surprised, breaking into the Canadian financial market as an outsider is almost impossible. Even most of the US banks that used to operate in Canada like Chase, Bank of America and Citi have left (at least for consumer products) and Capital One is really just a shell of its former self in the country (recently giving up its Costco partnership).
To be effective you need to partner with one of the major Canadian clearing banks and most (other than a smaller institution Home Trust) aren’t really interested in partnering with potential competitors.
The government (and previous governments) have had little interest in making the market more competitive and basically every market (financial or not) is duopoly or oligopoly (if you’re lucky).
There are a lot of great things about Canada but Canadian’s get ripped off left, right and centre.