Yeah, Canadian telecom kind of sucks. Basically, whatever area you live in has one regional monopoly for cable and one regional monopoly for DSL. These regional monopolies in turn are required to open their lines to competitors, but they don't maintain/improve the infrastructure very much and since the competition is running on their infrastructure, if you subscribe to a smaller company and you get problems coming from the monopoly (problems with the line, problems with the cable box, etc), the monopoly will laugh at you and maybe send a maintenance man to investigate sometime in the next month all the while claiming that you must be responsible for the problem somehow.
Anyhow, it occasionally works out, but it varies from one area to the next. When I lived in BC, the two monopolies were Telus and Shaw, which were very competitive, regularly offered special deals, provided excellent customer service and generally did a good job of things. Meanwhile, in southwestern Ontario, your two options are Cogeco, which is generally apathetic when it comes to customer service and offers mediocre speeds at high prices, or Bell, which makes its money from scamming elderly farmers that don't understand what the internet is (eg. $10-20/month for 10 GB/month at slightly better than dial up speeds) and selling out torrent users to King Harper and his pals in the entertainment industry. The absolute fastest internet I could get, and this is with one of those unreliable minor "competitors" running through Cogeco's infrastructure, is 20MB/s. I've a friend across the river in Michigan who can get about the same speed with a mid-upper tier package from an actual provider for a fraction of the price, and people in the States complain about their internet being slow.
Oh, uh, voting? Well, at least federally, I have the fortune of living in a riding where my vote could conceivably count, since all three major parties have won the seat recently. Less fortunately, I detest the major parties about equally and no worthwhile minor parties (eg. the Marxist-Leninists) have seen fit to run a candidate here. Also, the elections generally aren't that close even though there is a lot of swing because it comes down less to moderate voters being convinced to switch parties and more whether the crazed religious extremists, grumpy, now largely unemployed autoworkers, or rich immigrants decide to show up on any given year.
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Topic: Canadian Politics Mega-Thread! (Read 20275 times)