Without government regulations Canada wouldn't even have had 3rd party ISPs, and UBB would have been implemented long ago. The CRTC largely matched 3rd party DSL policy with 3rd party cable policy which was quite unregulated. The government forced a low price on Bell for 3rd party internet and are now largely retracting it. Regulation is what enabled something of a free marketplace (at least to the consumer) up until now.

I'm not surprised that you're raged, as a fellow Canuck I also pine for the goods available 1 hour and a sensual TSA patdown away, but you really shouldn't be surprised.

Because it's a perfectly functioning constitutional democracy and changing that constitution will be far, far too difficult. Plus many Canadians wish to keep the Monarchy. I certainly do. It's not like the US is getting rid of its President just because white wigs are no longer in fashion, or some other superfluous reason.

Canada and Mexico are America's top two sources of imported oil, how are these not good allies? http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html

It's been repeatedly shown that improved life expectancy and a higher standard of living lowers population growth. If you know your first two children will live relatively healthy and prosperous lives, there is a diminishing incentive to continue to produce children. The less you are sure your kids will live, the more you'd want to make some replacements just in case.

I suppose an important step in transitioning the US to the metric system is first ensuring that there is some aspect of the system which is imperfect. Surely metric has failed to catch on in part because it is not ridiculous enough for Americans (scientists notwithstanding)

right, but the real on-topic question would be how many pixels does his sentence require?

Though I've never been in this position, I found the suggestions on http://workawesome.com/your-job/reality-breakdown-raises-on-lowered-budgets/ informative. If you don't want to leave your job, some better perks might be a good starting point. Of course you could get your employer to hire a coop code monkey to do some of this stuff if they're looking for cheap labour.

You might be surprised to know that both Bell and Rogers have a significant Wimax network across the country. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inukshuk_Wireless Why they don't advertise it is beyond me. Bell could be carrying the Evo right now if they weren't trying to move so many iphones

I think it would be interesting to know what you think the NA in NAFTA stands for! America succeeded from the 1900s to the post-war era with a mix of low wages to immigrants and high levels of innovation. Not to mention a whole heck of a lot of natural resources which most countries severely lack. What other country has been able to exploit such a fertile and large landmass in such a good climate. If only Canada or Russia had that amount of sun and warmth

Canadian Music is actually pretty wonderful. The only problem with Canadian music is that the bad acts make it big for some reason (like nickelback, avril etc etc) while really solid acts like Feist, Broken Social Scene, The Stills, Crystal Castles (it's easy to continue) have difficulty making it mainstream. I like all these bands so its hard for me to see how people couldn't, but give Radio 2 a listen, they're doing great things to promote the Canadian music scene (when they're not playing classical) tl;dr: Canadian music is awesome, but bad is popular and good is still indie