Money

As you take your first step out on the Canadian soil, shaking snow off your boots and sneezing your first Canadian gesundheits, you must be wondering what every newcomer to Canada has wondered ever since the first settlers arrived at ‘our’ shores and collected their first native scalp:

That big bang you just heard wasn’t the garbage truck slamming your trashcans. It’s the marketing effort by a particular (recently-battered) industry targeting a particular community.

It’s the realization of something big. And that’s where the money is.

You see, there’s an entire cottage industry — no, strike that (silly me.) There’s a whole lucrative multi-billion dollar industry that’s been milking immigrants.

Tough economic times mean tightening belts. Governments are scaling back financial commitments and consumers are holding back unnecessary purchases. Even kids are having their allowances cut.

Of course, these are all boilerplate cliches. In real life, human nature compels us not to miss out on a great deal — something the marketing industry will continue to reap rewards with, and the advertising industry will happily tag along (I should know, I used to be an adman in my pre-Canadian career-gifted life.) But I digress.

I know two persons in this entire country, literally. One is a friend and the other is a sibling on the other side of the continent. In addition, two more people on my cellphone’s contact-list are really acquaintances with whom I have verbal speech once every 12 weeks or a dozen fortnights, whichever is less. When I left the mother-ship to beam up to Planet Canada, I had bid farewell to all my half-a-dozen friends and relatives there as well, for good. A couple of them I speak to once every six months. But that’s another story.

As with most ill-informed laymen, I often mistake my familiarity with something to be knowledge.

However, unlike those poor ill-informed sods, I do have the honour and privilege of personally getting some of the most brilliant first-hand insights and informed opinion on these financial crisis.

As blogged earlier, it’s no secret that Canada has one of the most expensive mobile / wireless / data services for a country of its economic class, if not the entire world. I attribute this sad fact to what I’ve begun calling The Great Canadian Telecom Cartel.

As my Canadian experience grows with each passing day, I am becoming more and more aware of how expensive things here really are – in Ontario at least, where I live.