Oh! Canada!

And what is happening with our neighbors to the north?  They are by reputation the "more civilized" America, but lately they've been anything but. 

I usually think of Canada this way:

Holland: Germand :: Canada: America

Like Holland is Germany Light, like Germany with a smile, Canada has always been the polite America, with real social services, real social security, and, you know, no aircraft carriers and all.   So what's come over them? 

First: Quebec has decided to unilaterally declare many tens of thousands of unmarried couples to be suddenly, legally married.  Lots of people, it seems, co-habitate and check "couple" on their taxes, and the government has decided to just declare them married by fiat.  Doesn't seem right, now does it?

Second: They've got these new weird copyright laws floating around.  A member of parliament recently talked about taking your CD's and putting them on your computer so you could listen on MP3 players, etc.  Sounds innocent enough, I mean you paid for the music, right?  No, no, no, not for the new copyright police.  This guy sounded like a lawyer for an American music conglomerate.  He said that ripping your CD's for other uses was "like buying a pair of shoes, and then going back and stealing the socks to go with them."  Where do they get these cute ideas? 

Third:  Evidently someone has decided that the National Archive of Canada is not really worth preserving after all.  So their budget is down to nothing, the process of digitizing everything is being neglected, and the archive is being decentralized so that research will be much more difficult. 

Fourth:  Tuition riots, again in Quebec. 

Fifth:  Law 78 (honest, you can't make this stuff up).  An "anti-protest" law, who knew that they had a big protest problem in Canada?  The law has led to, wait for it!  PROTESTS. 


That's all I can think of right now.  But Canada, what happened?  We thought we knew yee.