Paying lower taxes is mooching?
I thought we’d agreed that Canadian strippers on salary instead of tips were mooching?
Man, this thread is moving too fast.
But the USA gets to be Europe’s navy, and that makes it all worth it, right?
When I moved from Wisconsin to Vancouver, the cost of my broadband dropped by 60%, and the bandwidth increased by 100%. Americans get sodomized on their broadband in comparison to everyone else.
“Mooching”? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
Or, that?
So Discovery airs Mythbusters here on a regular schedule, albeit some months behind the American version, and you think Can-con rules are to blame? How exactly does delaying the airing of Mythbusters episodes increase the percentage of Canadian content on Discovery?
I gotta confess, I’m completely baffled as to your thought process here.
I thought I put enough caveats around that. I don’t know how much red tape Can-con rules generate for people bringing content to Canada, but I would think it can’t be zero. For example, Amazon only opened a Kindle store for Canadians this month, and one of the things they mentioned is that it would have ‘special Canadian only content’. I also noticed that many titles available in the American store were not available in the Canadian Kindle store.
Now, I don’t know if the ‘special Canadian content’ is a marketing ploy, or whether it took the Kindle store this long to open in Canada for other reasons just as copyright issues. I honestly don’t know. But if Can-Con rules apply, then it must have taken some time to manage that and to set up a store that had the right percentage of Canadian Content. But I don’t even know if that was the case. I was merely speculating.
I also said in my first message that the effect of Can-Con rules is small compared to other issues, and that it wasn’t something I was particularly worried about.
As for Mythbusters, again I was speculating. Do Can-Con rules apply to new content and change once the content is no longer considered first run? I don’t know. I suppose a more likely explanation is that the Canadian distributor negotiated a deal for a lower price to take a later feed or something, but that seems odd too. Quite frankly, I don’t understand why anyone would air a popular show months after it aired in the U.S. It seems like a strange decision for any reason. But they do it. Or at least they did. Plenty of shows don’t air in Canada at the same time as they air in the U.S. or the UK. It annoys the crap out of me.
So far as I can tell, the only Can-Con red tape is in getting a program certified as Canadian if it isn’t produced entirely in Canada by Canadians. I presume that burden falls on producers and not broadcasters.
If you look at the CRTC rules, they’re all about how many Canadian shows you need to air in which time slots. That’s it. Once you’ve aired enough Can-Con, the CRTC doesn’t care about what else you air. You can’t earn Can-Con credits for showing second run foreign material.
I’m sure your Mythbusters peeve is entirely due to licensing costs. Capitalism at work. I suppose you could petition Shaw to pressure Discovery to pay more for current Mythbusters episodes and tack the difference onto your cable bill?
I’ve been buying books for Kindle from Amazon for a year, at least.
Yeah, we’ll we got our first Target store a month ago, so I think you’re wrong about it being because of cannon, which does not apply to retail stores at all. Being that far behind is par for the course here, not exactly proving your point.
I was gonna get all offended for a second. But then I remembered on reading Mr. Ekers’ post that I thought: “Wow, it’d be great to chase a toddler on a horse. Maybe just a catch and release thing. We could use lassos.”*
So, in all fairness, I do love me some terrified toddlers. On the other hand, I want to ride the horse not marry it. Now, there was a documentary that used to be broadcast pretty regularly about some love triangle between Dudley, Nell and Horse that happened in Canada. So you’re probably half right.
- Yes, I am a Texan who has ridden a horse, thrown a lasso, and has no concern for the safety of children. Yet, even I wouldn’t vote for someone like Rick Perry
Most fundamentalist horses will demand you marry them before riding.
I don’t care what it thinks, it’s a horse. Which is why I don’t want to marry one - I’d never respect it.
Data limits can be low with the big providers, but when I looked at Netflix they had a horrible selection of streaming content for Canadians. Unless they’ve improved a lot since they first started up here I’d blame that instead.
nm
As an example of what it’s like to operate a business in Quebec
‘Pasta’ on Montreal menu cooks up controversy with language watchdog
Quebec’s language watchdog has set its sights on one of the trendiest restaurants in Montreal, over the inclusion of the word ‘pasta’ on its menus.
According to the letter, the menu’s use of Italian words in the titles of some dishes, despite their being accompanied by descriptions in French, falls short of compliance with the province’s language charter.
A lot of the Amazon/Netflix issues are likely due to licensing differences. While most US origin books are sold for the North American market, some of the books on Amazon may be licensed for publishing/sale only in the US market, with Canada included in the British & Commonwealth market. This would require either negotiating a separate licensing agreement, or a way of excluding these from Canadian sales. Ditto for Netflix movie/TV rebroadcast rights. Netflix may have an agreement with CBS for a TV show, but Global has the Canadian rights to that show, so a new agreement or a way to exclude the show from their lineup for Canadian customers.
(Note also that for the hard-copy DVD rental business, Netflix has an existing Canadian competitor in Zip.ca. Whether Zip can survive without being overwhelmed our bought out remains to be seen.)
The language commission backed down on this one. You’re trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill: as a lot of Anglo-Canadians like to do.
I completely get why the Quebecois want to protect their language. Is it any different from traveling through Wales and seeing signs in both languages? It really is a unique culture; I wouldn’t want it any other way. I don’t want to travel to Quebec City some day and see English-only McDonalds and Walmarts.
In that you probably don’t need to be in an epileptic seizure to pronounce French words.