Things That Suck in Canada

I love Canada, but there are three things that suck something fierce in my country (no, this post will not talk about taxes): banks, cell phone connections, and the Internet. These three areas are monopolized, which is never good because when there is a monopoly, competition dies. And when there is no competition, there is no incentive to provide goods and services that are even marginally decent.

Canadian banks charge you for every breath you take. Depositing, withdrawing, having an account - everything carries a fee. They mess up, steal your money, and charge you for this transaction. (This actually happened to me. National Bank of Canada stole $1,000 from me, and I could do nothing to get it back. They even recognized they messed up, but that money has never been recovered. By me, that is.) 

They also have this weird policy of "freezing" any money you deposit. I deposit some money in cash, and can't have access to it for days. If you deposit a check, it's frozen at least for a week. If the check is American, your money is frozen for 30 days. I once deposited a check from the Treasury of the US in the amount of $250. And then I had to wait for 30 days for it to clear. I mean, I know the US Treasury is not in great shape, but you can reasonably expect it to be able to clear a $250 check, right? After I moved to the US, I kept bugging bank tellers, unable to believe how easy banking was in the US: "So you are saying that I can deposit this check and have access to my money immediately? Like, right now? Like, this very moment? For real?" 

Canadian Internet banking is a story that I'll keep for another day because it's too bizarre. And if you dare to lose your bank card, woe betide you. You will be tortured and abused by the condescending bank tellers to the degree where you will start considering how great life was before the banking system came into existence.

The cell phone services in Canada are equally nasty. The quality of the connection sucks. Canadians know that there are specific places in their houses, apartments, offices, streets, where cell phone connection just dies. Every conversation I have with my sister who lives in Montreal is punctured by her saying "OK, I'm gonna get disconnected now. OK, the connection is about to drop again. Don't hang up if the sound disappears, it might get back up in a minute." And the cost of having a cell phone has always been sky-high. When I moved back to Canada for a year in 2007-8, I could never understand my cell phone bill. I kept thinking that somebody put the wrong number of zeros on the amount I owed. My happy-go-lucky American habit of blabbing on the cell phone all day long had to be abandoned.

The Internet connection is also expensive, slow and bad. In the US, you can always catch some free Wi-Fi somewhere, but in Canada it’s all password protected. Even in Starbucks, you can’t get free Wi-Fi. Every time I go back to Canada, I prepare to struggle with the Internet connection. As a blogger in the US, I'm used to being able to blog from pretty much anywhere. In Canada, though, I always feel disconnected from the world. Every trip to Canada is spent in a frantic search for a connection. And even if you are fortunate enough to find one, prepare for it to drop for no apparent reason at the worst moment possible.

As if things weren't bad enough as it is, Canadian monopolists are now trying to make the Internet connection even harder to get and even more expensive:

The CRTC has decided to allow Bell and other big telecom companies to change the way Canadians are billed for Internet access. Metering, or usage-based billing (UBB), will mean that service providers can charge per byte in addition to their basic access charges. The move is sure to stifle digital creativity in Canada while the rest of the world looks on and snickers.

 This is so wrong, people.

New York Times Keeps Kissing Bankers' Asses

I'm always appalled how print journalists manage to combine the most idiotic journalistic actions with endless whining about their profession dying out. In a recent issue of The New York Times, a journalist called Eric Dash attempts to entertain his readers by singing praises to Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan. Dash is practically swooning at the mention of Dimon's "successes":

The crisis cemented Mr. Dimon’s reputation as a financial superstar — a bold dealmaker who buys when others are selling, a strict risk manager who resisted the type of exotic businesses that felled others and a charismatic leader who charms lawmakers and credit traders alike. He is now commonly referred to by a single name, like Pelé or Madonna. . . At age 54, Mr. Dimon has only begun trying to build the kind of global banking empire he initially set out to create with Mr. Weill at Citigroup. While JPMorgan’s share price fared better than most of the banking sector through the turbulence of the last few years, at around $40.35, it remains roughly where it was when Mr. Dimon took over as chief executive in December 2005.

Of course, it is of no interest to Dash that the practices this vile crook has adopted are going to lead us into yet another round of this crisis. Dimon is one of those people who have learned nothing as a result of the crisis (and why should they? They always have the government to offer them handouts that will save them.) He is handing even more credit cards now than he used to before: 

Chase Card Services, meanwhile, has introduced three new types of credit cards in the last year. In the second quarter alone, it mailed out an estimated 164 million applications, according to data from Synovate, a research firm. That was more than twice the number sent out by American Express, the next most active issuer, and made up nearly one-third of the industry’s total mailings.When the head of the credit card division offered to scale back as losses spiraled, Mr. Dimon was emphatically opposed. “We don’t want to do stupid things because we are losing a lot of money,” Mr. Dimon said, anticipating a rebound in the card business. “Hell no. We are going to do the right thing as fast as we can.”

 And this is the kind of person that The New York Times journalists are gushing over. Has anybody at this so-called news source ever considered that the role of journalists is not to see who manages to stick their tongue deeper into some crook's anus? Have people like Eric Dash ever heard that being a journalist doesn't mean singing praise to every wealthy criminal that comes along?


When the new round of this economic crisis comes along, I sincerely hope that one good result of it will be that The New York Times will finally go out of business and take people like Dash with it into a well-deserved oblivion. They will always be able to make a living by prostrating themselves in the dirt under the feet of these bankers to prevent them from muddying up their expensive shoes.