Check some trace routes and see where things go. Not sure how bad Shaw is with ignoring any and all IXs. But Rogers and Telus would send some 5km away end-point packet on a tour of the USA. No wonder why voip.ms seemed so shaky.

Like, hey Telus, you’re a Canadian ISP. Maybe peer in Canada instead of US only?

https://www.peeringdb.com/net/76

Teksavvy sells service in Shaw areas. Not sure which other independent ISPs do.

Can always use tor or VPNs, but need to understand their limitations and problems too.

Use startpage.com [0] for your Google searches, DDG even has the !sp bang for that. Be very cautiousness about whom you share your mobile number for what, it's used to cross-reference account ownership across services.

Many services use them for 2-step, but very likely also share them past that, that's also how the numbers end up with spammers/scammers.

VPN I'm a bit lukewarm on, heavily depends on the VPN because in the worst case you will funnel all your traffic trough one party giving them very convenient access. Least of all look for a VPN that offers anonymous payment options, afaik there are even some that accept cash-drops or money sent in.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage.com#Startpage

The major anglophone countries make up the five eyes. In practice anything you do would be marginal at best unless your goal is to only thwart commercial surveillance.

Any VPN other than TOR just moves the problem somewhere else and likely makes it worse.