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Comment by gyardley | Hacker News Reader

The typical Canadian will irrationally defend any policy that differs from the equivalent policy in America, because the typical Canadian's sense of national identity is 10% hockey and 90% 'we're different from the Americans'.

We're never going to deregulate and allow a little free-market competition to lower prices as long as these proposals can be criticized as 'Americanization' or 'the American way'. It's not complacency that ties Canadians to our goofy oligopolies, it's our own misguided nationalism.

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This is so laughably wrong as to be absurd. Your explanation for Canadian telecom entrenchment and protectionism is that it's anti-American? Canada and its provinces have imported America's love of faux-competition in media, telecom, electricity, non-health insurance, and other areas nearly whole hog.

Anti-Americanism also runs contrary to Canada's: plans to imprison more of its population; paying extra for ill-performing military hardware; treating its First Nations like shit; increasing gap between rich and poor; busting of unions; beating the hell out of protestors; resisting all meaningful measures against climate change; and fighting pointless wars.

Canada could use some of this "we're different from the Americans" attitude that you claim pervades the nation. Sadly, I don't see much evidence of it in any of several areas of society, especially the telecom industry.

I'll agree that the current federal government is a bit of an aberration compared to past Liberal and Conservative governments, but playing up differences from the Americans to justify political policies (good or bad - I suppose that depends on your personal politics) has been a big part of Canadian political life since Trudeau's first term in the late '60s.

Whether Canada is actually all that different from America or whether 'different from America' is just used as a cynical political tool is another question.

People are driven to play one side of the fence or the other. As an example, many had fought to deregulate our banks. Now, after the recession, where are all these people? crickets Our banks in Canada were one of the only in the world to not suffer serious hardship coupled with millions of dollars lost in foreclosures, lost benefits and savings. This was, without question, due to regulation. Canada would not be in the position it is today had it deregulated the banks. This is a fact served by many, many examples throughout the world.

Admittingly, not all regulation is good. Matters like these should be investigated on a individual basis with due process. It isn't a matter of deregulation vs. regulation. Or Canada vs. USA. These mindsets are dangerous as they rubberstamp behaviour without consideration to the influences these actions may or may not have.

The CRTC needs good reform, but full deregulation is not my preference. The CRTC must encourage (require?) innovation for Canadians. That's the problem. We're unhappy because we don't have the innovations we should - and we pay top dollar for archaic services.

Deregulated media only means Bell/Rogers/Shaw will eventually be in the hands of conglomerates. There are financial advantages to this, but a boat-load of disadvantages not seen immediately. Do you think Comcast or AT&T would continue to employ 50,000+ people in Canada to uphold their Canadian operations had they the opportunity to purchase our telcos? Doubtful. What about our programming? What about censorship in the media - would we eventually adopt the American model if it's less work for them to uphold our model with theirs? With SOPA, we'd essentially inherit American policies without force. Not something I'd consider an improvement.

Yep, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about.

A few decent regulations around underwriting mortgages, and most Canadians will conflate that into 'the banking industry shouldn't be touched' -- even though there's only six banks and they charge more in fees than American banks. (Which is saying a lot.)

And god forbid anyone say anything against the CMHC, which is a secretive time-bomb more leveraged than Fannie Mae ever was. Canada might have better underwriting rules for mortgages, but the mortgages themselves are 100% guaranteed by the Canadian taxpayer - for all we know, our housing crisis might still be ahead of us.

But hey, at least it's not America!

> Canadians will conflate that into 'the banking industry shouldn't be touched' -- even though there's only six banks and they charge more in fees than American banks. (Which is saying a lot.)

There is a bigger picture here. Our fees may be more (I have no idea), but our interest rates are higher for deposits most of the time. You're not considering any other factors for the higher prices. Personally, if our banks are making a lot of money, not putting everyone in the poor house and offering some of the best financing rates and deposit interest rates in the world, why do they need to be touched? I don't understand the motivation to make changes to something that isn't broken. The banking industry will never be perfect. If you're hoping for this utopian world of low/no bank fee, open market, low interest, high deposit interest, I think you're going to be disappointed to find out that it doesn't exist. Proof of such is in abundance.

> And god forbid anyone say anything against the CMHC, which is a secretive time-bomb more leveraged than Fannie Mae ever was.

CMHC also needs restructuring, but again, not deregulation. Why do we have it in our heads that corporations are less evil than the government? The government and corporations should exist with a set of regulations so that decisions made are for the benefit of the world, not just investors. The government and corporations both fail miserably without intervention and debate. It's not okay for the CMHC to be in secrecy, but it's also not right for Fannie Mae, either.

> for all we know, our housing crisis might still be ahead of us.

> But hey, at least it's not America!

Come on, really?

Australia isn't exactly America. In most ways we are much closer to Canada than the US.

For example, we have strong financial sector regulation, a public health care system etc etc.

In the telecommunications sector we have a powerful regulator (the ACCC) to enforce competition policy (usually against the old incumbent telco).

Another difference to the US is that the incumbent telco (Telstra) is legally obliged to give access other players access to its exchanges. That has enabled other players to do things Telstra said were impossible or uneconomic (for example, smaller players rolled out ADSL2 much quicker than Telstra said was possible using this access).

> That has enabled other players to do things Telstra said were impossible or uneconomic (for example, smaller players rolled out ADSL2 much quicker than Telstra said was possible using this access).

Not if those other players are rolling out ADSL2 on Telstra owned lines that have to be pre-configured by Telstra technicians, as I discovered when I attempted to order ADSL service from Adam in Adelaide. The Telstra technicians flat-out lied about their first no-show to my house, messed up the connection on their second visit, and only get things working on their third visit. And they billed Adam for each of those visits. Total turnaround time was almost three weeks.

Turnaround time for 18 Mbit cable from Optus in Melbourne? Two days. Those guys wanted my business and they hustled to get it.

And when I attempted to complain about Telstra's behaviour to the "powerful regulator" they threw it back at Adam since pedantically speaking they were my provider!

This kind of monopolistic arrogance explains why Australia's fixed line infrastructure is a joke. The best way to enforce competition is to create a completely level playing field for all competitors.

As a Canadian I can honestly say I have no idea what you are talking about.

You think American markets aren't oligopolistic, especially telecom?

Of course they are, in absolute terms.

That said, I was making a relative comparison to Canada.

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