Oh, That Nanny State

I'm not a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination, but one thing that really strikes me about living in Canada is the how the paternalistic tentacles of the Canadian government have a way of reaching into the farthest corners of your life. One thing that happened to me this year involved my Blackberry. As you have probably heard, one company practically has a monopoly over almost all Canadian cell phone service. I thought I would avoid this by keeping my American Blackberry with T-Mobile International E-mail service. Unfortunately, the Blackberry broke. To make a very long story short, I received a free, refurbished replacement Blackberry due to company error. End of story, or so I THOUGHT.

I soon received a barrage of phone calls about this Blackberry, implying that I owed the Canadian government $150 on this "purchase" from the United States. It took me a lot of calls and E-mails before I could convince them that I owed nothing, as the Blackberry was not a new purchase, but a free, refurbished replacement. How fun.

On a totally unrelated note, the lives of Canadian bodybuilders are also intimately affected by the all-seeing eye of the government - they are denied all supplements containing L-Carnitine (illegal in the country). Yet you can buy a joint on every corner of British Columbia!