I’m curious why you’d be paying any taxes to Canada, since Canada only taxes residents. Do you qualify as a Canadian resident (IIRC, living 6 months and one day in a given calendar year)?
With regard to the perceived relative inefficiancy of “checks,” keep in mind that the US system is rather unique. In Canada, for instance, slippage* is illegal, so banks have no incentive to delay depositing funds into the accounts of cheque payees. While the Canadian banks are larger than all but the biggest US banks, the banking industry in the US is more than large enough to achieve the economies of scale necessary to implement quicker systems. Unfortunately, that was erase a significant contributor to consumer banking profits.
- By slippage, I mean the use of money an institution gets between the time that it withdraws the funds from a payer’s account and the time it deposits it into the payee’s account. The [Canadian] Bank Act stipulates that financial institutions may not profit from delays in processing cheques.