Any time you sign up for anything you should ALWAYS read the fine print. That's just being a good consumer! GoodLife signs people up for one year membership commitments. If you want to cancel early, it states right on the back of your agreement that you can pay a $99 buy out fee. If you are past your first year you can cancel at any time with no fees, just 30 days notice. They do now offer term memberships but this is a much more expensive option. My best advise is know what you want and PAY ATTENTION when you are speaking to the representative. Ask questions and get answers, read the fine print, and know what you are getting yourself into so that you don't end up hating a company that didn't do anything to you that you didn't agree to in the first place!

If you have issues with your billing then it really shouldn't be that difficult to get it sorted out. You have your copy of your agreement and you have your bank statements showing the amount being taken. Bring both these items into your club, they will take photo copies, and if a refund is required, they will do a request that will take 4-6 weeks to be sent to you in the form of a check. If you can't get help from the associates in the club, which you should be able to, then you can always call their head office at 1-800-387-2524 and they will help you sort out your issues. They will more than likely require you to fax them your documentation, but they will get it sorted out.
Unlike some other fitness companies, GoodLife is not the kind of company that likes to take more money from their members than they are supposed to! That being said, mistakes can be made, people are only human! It is unfortunate that you were one of the few unlucky people to be on the mistakes are made side of it.

I feel your pain on this one for sure, however, as you said yourself, you did sign the paper. At GoodLife they always have a restart date when the payments would restart automatically after a hold. It isn't the company's fault that you didn't notice over the course of an entire year. I am suprised that they were kind enough to give you 3 months free as this is not something that they would normally do.
The thing that confuses me with this one though is that they would put your daughter on a hold. As far as I can tell from what you wrote, she was within her first year. The only holds they do within the first year are for medical reasons with a dr.s note provided. Even still, holds are only done for six months at a time. Even more so, non-medical holds are to a maximum of six months per calander year. So what you are describing is actually against their policy and was actually an advantage to you because you didn't have to pay for something that you should have been paying for over that period of time. So in that way it did kind of work out because you ended up paying for time after the fact.
That being said, what should have been done in this case,... the staff should have offered you the $99 buyout option for cancelling within the first year. The other option is to find someone else who is interested in joining. You can then do a membership transfer which means that person starts a new membership and you get out of your agreement without having to pay the buyout fee.
But if you were, as you say, paying for both yourself and your wife as well, then your daughter should have been added as a 3rd family member for a lower price and then would have access to all clubs (excluding the platinum clubs) and in which case would have been able to use any of the clubs in Toronto while at school.