The People's Republic of Canada is a Second World country. It has 10,000 psi micro-flush toilets, narrow shiny recycled toilet paper, and promises of a better life if elitist factions (anybody not on the Dole) would cough up funds to enable Ottawa to proceed. Canukistan digs up and chops down its natural resources, selling them at rock bottom prices to better countries that manufacture stuff and sell it back at top dollar cost. 95% of Canadienne bipeds live within 150 miles of the US border. Everybody of consequence (less First Americans freezing their permafrosted aboriginal asses off) glares south at uncouth bastards who threw off English monarchy to seize paradise in positive cashflow. (Socialist eden rough spots are lubricated by alcoholism. Great Dank North beer is fine and powerful brew.)It was my travail June-August 1999 to pursue R&D at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. BC is the Confederation's garden spot. There are summer days with sunshine absent black flies, mosquitoes, and 95% relative humidity; Quebecois are told to "speak White," and greenbacks inspire decorous yelps of adoration. Mull upon an archetype of First World insouciance, the Coke machine. UVic had Pepsi (acidulated treacle) machines.
$(Cdn)1.50 for a bottle of Pepsi was $(US)1.00. Drop a $(Cdn)2 twonie coin or two $(Cdn)1 loonie coins into the slot and presumably the machine disgorged a Pepsi, Mountain Dew (brominated vegetable oil and auxiliary caffeine), Dr. Pepper (laxative), 7-Up, Lipton tea; apple juice for $1.75 (guaranteed to contain apple-originating assets); or a bottle of "purified drinking water" for $(Cdn)1.50. In the US that last item is a "two cents plain;" in Canadian scrip, a "three cents plain."
If there is one British Columbian particular suffered in crass glut it is water. Residential water was not metered until venal politicians mused revenue as opposed to consumption. Media shriek "Drought!" after seven consecutive dry days (supremely rare event in any case). The entirely of BC is a sodden moss-covered cubic rot-infested continuously sprinkled sponge. Do you want a drink? Look up with an open mouth. If you want to drown, do it under a roof edge.
A bottle of plain water sells for the price of a Pepsi containing water, 70 grams of corn syrup, a gamut of FDA GRAS chemicals, and quality assurance. The containers cancel as does the water. Is bottled water a giant screw of the purchaser? (Did Pierre Trudeau lean out a train window and give the finger to British Columbia up front and personal?) Questions of 100% Canadian content versus smuggled water arise.
The upscale UVic undergrad has dyed hair, a pierced face, baggy clothing, a sagging damp backpack, a smoldering cigarette, and a bottle of water conspicuously displayed. It makes for an unkempt Asian or East Indian trying to pass for US Inner City youth. The campus is littered with discarded poly(ethylene terepthalate) shells gently bobbing in puddles despite a preponderance of noisome recycling bins. (Collected urine flows diluted but otherwise unsullied into the ocean, then south to Washington State.) Victoria airport has a machine trading $(US)1 folding green for a loonie, a local profit of $(Cdn)0.47/transaction. Do not complain - they do it to their kids, too.
I retrieved a discarded water bottle for further analysis. Unlike the sharply defined threads of a pop bottle white screw cap, a water bottle blue cap has wormy rounded meanders that poorly mesh into their PET counterparts. Pay more, get less, be an Enviro-whiner.
What is in the "purified" water besides water? Inorganics are middling boring. Really dangerous stuff (Campylobacter, E. coli, cholera...) is carbon-based. It is a simple thing to dump a few milliliters of costly quaff into a 10 mm NMR tube, then into a 360 MHz FT-NMR for a carbon-13 spectrum accumulated through 40,000 pulses over a slow evening. Truth slithered out a laser printer the next morning. Drink tap water.
The true test of revenue enhancement ("cost recovery" in the Great Dank North - it shows you where their heads are at) is pelf accumulated at the end of the month. I witnessed a maintenance drone unlock, unscrew, unfasten, and otherwise open the Pepsi machine. He pulled out a spare handful of change, dropped a few bottles onto the refrigerated stacks, and restored the redundant hermetic seal. Call it 20 minutes. If he does that twice an hour all day long he might cost recover his salary.
Water in Canada is as precious as tears lost in rain unless you want to flaunt it in a polyester container and learn the cost of fatuous grandiloquent second rate Second World sin.