Ethics of making students purchase lecture notes
(This answer is based on US university practices.  I don't know if it is directly applicable to Canada, but the two systems generally tend to be similar.)

It's hard to be sure, but this might be a practice that's old-fashioned but not unethical.

First of all:


  Shouldn't students have access to lecture notes as part of the tuition fees that they have paid?


Not necessarily.  If the course requires materials that have a non-negligible cost, then typically students will be required to pay for them separately.  This includes textbooks, lab supplies, and, as in this case, custom-printed "course packets" of notes or other reading material.

Now, normally the university has its own service for printing course packets and selling them "at cost" through the university bookstore.  However, it sometimes happens that professors decide that some other bookstore or print shop can produce the packets better or cheaper, and so they have them made and sold there.  This may or may not be technically allowed by university rules, but it may be tolerated, especially if it's actually saving money for the students.  Note that in such cases, the professor normally doesn't receive any of the price of the packet; it all goes to the print shop.

So this isn't a completely unheard-of system for distributing printed material.

You could certainly ask the professor why they've chosen to do it this way.  My guess is you'll get a response like "I used to use the university bookstore, but the packets were always late / fell apart at the binding / ran out of stock / cost twice as much."  So you could try and complain about the use of an unofficial distributor, but be careful what you wish for.

It raises the question of why the notes have to be distributed in printed form at all, instead of electronically (in which case there should be no costs at all).  I can imagine this happening if the professor is very old-fashioned and  hasn't ever realized that this would be better, or if the notes don't exist in electronic form (e.g. they are handwritten or typed on a typewriter), or just "has always done it this way".  But it would be reasonable to suggest, either directly to the professor or in a course evaluation, that they consider electronic distribution.