Similar thing happened to me recently and it was just that my card had expired. Once I updated my card with Public Mobile, everything started to work again.
With Wise (formerly Transferwise) there are no fees to open an account, add a Canadian account to Wise and load it in Canadian dollars by sending push electronic transfers (I use Tangerine so no fees). Once the funds are in your Canadian account at ...
We had the same issue trying to set up an account. We ended up requesting and using a digital visa from our Wise account. Once we remembered they had the option to do this, it was very easy and fast - only took a few minutes to get the digital visa...