So here’s the cover of the September 2007 issue of Men’s Fitness magazine:

Now, I don’t buy magazines any more (especially fitness publications, which falsely promise brand-new ways to shave and do abdominal crunches every month) and it should come as no surprise that the intellectual and moral disconnect which occurs on scanning the price differential (above) pretty-much guarantees I won’t be doing so in the foreseeable future. The Canadian dollar is exactly equivalent to the U.S. dollar this weekend — news-captioned as “dollar at parody” — yet the pricing above clearly adds a 50% surcharge to the transaction.

And, oh, I can just hear the lame rationalizations from booksellers and distributors: “the cost of doing business in Canada is higher!” “The prices were set months ago, when currencies were not equivalent!” “You have to understand that…”

No, wait, just shut the fuck up.

The exchange rate has never been, in my 51+ years on this planet, at 50%. If you were truly passing along exchange-rate differentials from months ago, you will three months from now feature pricing that is exactly equivalent, and you and I both know there’s no fucking way that’ll happen.

I’m turning a deaf ear, now, to media fearmongering that the strong Canadian dollar means Bad News for Canadian manufacturers, those same Canadian manufacturers who lay off thousands when they open up plants in second- or third-world nations, or who downsize because shareholders are demanding unrealistic returns on investment (based on unrealistic profits born in the Reagan years), or who outsource whole departments to wildly-incompetent, largely-foreign service industries.

I’m uninterested in paying 25-50% more for the inferior design and construction of Canadian goods — if, in fact, a Canadian manufacturer is intelligent enough to actually make something worth buying. The Canadian, “why waste time and money pursuing excellence when good enough will do” motto doesn’t wash when Canadian consumers who do pursue excellence can order books through Amazon.COM rather than Chapters.CA, and can drive an hour or two south of the border and pick up a staggering selection of goods which Canadian retailers possessing the same name feel is, perhaps, “too much selection.”

The Canadian media will now focus their energies concerning economic reporting to instilling fears that, while the dollar parity is good news for consumers (and travelers) it’s bad news for manufacturers and that means layoffs and whatnot. Well, fuck them. The past twenty years have been nothing but fear-mongering concerning layoffs, as corporate decisions are made to squeeze out an extra percentage-point in profit at any cost, even if it means weakening of the social fabric in this country.

The time for a consumer revolt in Canada is long, long overdue. Ask to speak to the manager of Chapters and demand to pay the clearly-marked US-dollar price on goods. Tell the manager at The Bay that you won’t be buying that sofa because you can get a much better-designed and more sturdily-made sofa in Buffalo. It’s always been about money and, this week, Canadian consumers have a symbolic muscle which they sorely need to exercise.