I think you are falling for a conspiracy theory, and a silly one at
that.  If the Canadian phone company were using the Verizon SID then
your phone wouldn't know it was roaming and wouldn't turn on the
roaming indicator.

I think you are also getting confused about who is putting your roaming
charges in their pocket.  Verizon is perfectly capable of blocking
international roaming from your account if they feel like doing it,
and for most countries this is exactly what they do by default.  If
you want to take your phone to Korea, or Mexico, or China and use it
there, you'll need to talk to Verizon first and get them to enable
international roaming on your account or your phone won't get service.
When you call Verizon they'll check your credit again, and if you don't
have a score significantly higher than you needed to qualify for domestic
postpaid service they'll decline to enable it.  The reason Verizon does
this is for Verizon's protection; Verizon needs to pay the foreign
companies serious money for your roaming service, so they want to make
sure you'll pay them back before they let you do it.

There are, however, a few places where Verizon will let you roam without
the credit check and, as you've discovered, Canada is one of them.
I think the reason for this is that the roaming rates Verizon pays to
those carriers are quite tiny, on the order of domestic roaming
rates.  Both Verizon and Bell Mobility offer, or have offered, plans
which include roaming in the other country for not a whole lot more
than domestic-only plans, and the reason they can do this is that
roaming in the other country isn't much more expensive to them than
the domestic-only roaming that is already included in most plans.
I pay Verizon about $20 per month more than an equivalent domestic-only
plan for inclusive roaming in Canada and Mexico, and I think most of
that difference is going to pay for Mexico.  Canada roaming costs
Verizon very little.

So Verizon doesn't feel any need to protect themselves from Canada
roaming charges since those charges don't cost Verizon much.  If you
qualify for Verizon postpaid service you can go to Canada and knock
yourself out using the phone there too; if you stiff Verizon for that
bill Verizon's actual out-of-pocket loss will be limited enough that
they don't need to worry about it more than they worry about domestic
roaming.

So, when you pay 69 cents/minute for a Canada roaming call, the
Canadian company gets a little bit of that but most of it goes to
Verizon.  The Canadian company doesn't particularly want to roam
on their network since they don't make a whole lot of money from
that (the Canadian company instead makes their money by charging
their customers high prices for roaming on Verizon's network), and
Verizon doesn't have a lot of incentive to help you avoid the
charges since buying minutes for very little and selling them for
69 cents is fine business if you can do it.  Your problem is
really with Verizon alone.

Dennis Ferguson