it’s also insane because probably no Canadian wants their traffic going through the US unnecessarily, since all the 51st state takeover crap.

FWIW, this has being going on for decades. Bell literally doesn't care if there's a chance they can suck up some peering fees.

There have been periodic times where it became an acute problem, like early in the YouTube and Netflix years there was a lot of congestion in their upstream peers and they held out hoping those orgs would pay for the peering. They were also over provisioned in early DSL days where their upstreams became saturated and there were few alternative paths.

Maybe that's a way to give them bad PR and convince then to change policies? Unfortunately most people probably don't understand this well enough and they have a pretty well oiled PR machine with all their control over tv and radio stations, etc