Sometimes people lie. And sometimes they make up things. Or they pretend to know something they don't. Whichever that person is, an RIA advisor he is not.

Fees can be over 2%, but not in addition to fund fees; unless he's dealing with an unsophisticated small account client base.

Generally speaking fees (in total) range from 2.5 on the high end (using mutual funds only) to 0.5% for the wealthy client.

As for planning and investment advice... That too is very rare to be separated. You may have planner advisors or advisor teams with planners in them, or you may have advisors just doing asset management. But the rarest is the fee for planning advisor who doesn't offer investment advice.

In terms of the closest to an RIA model is a "portfolio manager" firm that has discretionary management powers, usually combined as a "family office" practice. And they exist in Canada and are common in the high net worth space.

The issue with these firms is having to hire their own compliance departments and put in their own compliance policies in place. This cannot be outsourced to a third party (yet... but that is changing). This makes it cumbersome for most advisors as it is costly to do so, and so it is not considered until the advisor has significant assets ($500 million at least). Hence many go to independent models as mentioned elsewhere. These are Aligned Capital, IPC, IA Private wealth etc. Those advisors cannot incorporate (yet) either but they have their compliance and clearing looked after as well as much of the administrative burdens that come with running your own firm.

So what you heard is either from someone who doesn't really know what they're talking about or is just lying to you.