Doesn't Matter Who You Vote For

I'm growing tired of a lack of competition.

Bell Canada, our might telephonic overlord here in The Great White North (current temp: 26 degrees C), is slowly finding new ways to fuck with its customers.

Recently, they started throttling all p2p traffic on their high speed lines between 4:30pm and 2am. When forced to release their traffic data, it turns out it might not have been as necessary as they claimed. See, they even throttled the wholesalers who were buying large chunks of bandwidth to resell.

Now I get a notice on my cell bill - starting August, I will be charged $0.15 per INCOMING text message. So some douchebag could decide to spam my number and I get charged for it. Fucking brilliant. Oh, unless I sign up for their text plan.

FUCK YOU.

This is no different than their "service" plan on the landline - $5/month and they'll come out and fix your phone. If you don't take the plan, it's $65 just to show up. I opted to not take the plan and my phone went down 2 weeks later. I'm still not on their asinine plan.

Yah, I have Internet access, cell, and landline through these fuckers. Why? The competition is just as bad.

Telus is reatarded for cell service. I've seen them dick around customers ad naseum.

Rogers finds ways to suck the cool out of everything and also fuck over customers with excessive fees and charges for cell service. Plus, they offer a landline that breaks down around once a week and is totally unreliable. I do have them for digital cable, although they're compressing the HD feeds now and are slow to update their On-Demand service. Their high-speed offering is a shared network, which suffers slowdowns in high-density areas and also puts hard caps on bandwidth usage.

And that's it for options.

New, cheaper cell providers are apparently coming in soon, so we'll see how that plays out. Bell is about to be privatized, which could make things interesting. I expect divisions will be spun off.

And it isn't limited to services. Our government is pissing me off these days too. The current minority administration is a bunch of buffoons who can't find Ontario on a map because we didn't vote for them. This means the economic engine of the country (no matter how much Alberta wants to think its oil is what drives the country) is constantly shafted. In fact, since their base is a bunch of farmers, they treat the entire country like stereotypical country boys. They're currently running attack ads on the opposition leader that are vapid, empty, and brain-dead. Every time they come on, I want to hurl something at the speaker. The thing is, my family comes from farmers - they're too smart to fall for that crap... but they'll probably stick with them for other reasons.

But the Liberals aren't any better. Voting Stephane Dion as their leader was idiotic on their part. He got in to try and win Quebec, because he's French. The problem is, 75% of the country isn't Quebecois. He has almost no charisma and stumbled so much out of the gate that it was embarrassing. Then again, the Liberals have been a do-nothing party since their inception. The fact they've shown less backbone than the Democratic congress in the US, and we have a MINORITY government, speaks volumes.

Which leaves the NDP - small, union-friendly, with policies that are noble but prohibitively expensive. I loved them in their last incarnation as the party with swing power. It got less-expensive, more-viable versions of their goals and ideals into play without bankrupting the country. Now, they have no power... and they should NEVER have majority powers.

The Bloc Quebecois? Only in Quebec with a goal of separating the country. I think not.

Green? Tiny. I like their ideas, but again, they're not economically viable.

Progressive Canadian Party? PCP? Really? Actually, I like them, but they're practically non-existant. The Green party is more viable.

Then the fringes - Marijuana party, Marxist-Leninists, Communists, etc.. Whatever. We've got one severe lack of worthwhile options here.

Rant over.