@Angus1
You can check your voicemail from any phone by dialing your own phone number (and PIN), as others have advised above.
Any phone purchased on the Canadian market is SIM-compatible and radio-compatible. You only have to do your research when purchasing phones intended for foreign regions (Europe, India, China, etc). If you buy your phone from a retailer in Canada instead of from alibaba/ebay/amazon/etc then no worries.
https://www.publicmobile.ca/en/on/get-help/articles/check-your-phones-compatibility
https://willmyphonework.net/
The phone must be unlocked (not carrier-locked). And it must not be blacklisted (not reported as lost/stolen/etc).
If it's a new unlocked phone - it says "unlocked" on the box - then no worries.
You can buy new unlocked phones from many retailers, places like Walmart, Staples, and London Drugs.
You can also go to any wireless store or kiosk, but their primary interest will be to sell you a new phone on a contract, not an unlocked device you can take somewhere else.
You can buy used phones from craigslist, from local social media markets/auctions, from people you know.
If you do this then always test the phone first. Plug in your PM SIM card and see if it works. If it doesn't work then you don't want to buy somebody else's problem.
Beware that the vast majority of consumers often claim (and often genuinely believe) that their phone is "unlocked" without being correct and without even knowing exactly what "unlocked" means. Any phone which displays "Invalid SIM" or "SIM not supported" is indeed locked - the problem is in the phone, not in the SIM.
Public Mobile also sells overstock and refurb phones these days.
Their selection is small and their prices are hit-or-miss, but these phones are all preconfigured to work with Public Mobile and all have 1-year warranty. Most buyers seem satisfied but a few have come onto these forums to report their disappointment.
https://www.publicmobile.ca/en/bc/phone-section
You should extract your PM SIM card from your dead old phone. Dry it off, test it in another device. It might still work, it might need to be replaced with a new one.
You can also take your drowned phone to a repair shop. They might be able to fix it, they might not. They might be able to restore or recover and precious data/information you had stored on it, they might not. It might cost you less to buy a new phone than to repair the old one anyhow.
