Is Canada really more friendly to hobby broadcasting?

Carl, your post reminds me of a true story.  I briefly worked in California in the early 80's (I had developed software for a graphical Internet-like service well before that existed in the true Internet - at that time, everything was text).  So I was supposed to be met at the airport by representatives of the company I was going to work for.  It was the middle of summer.  But when we arrived, they were nowhere to be found.  I finally had them paged.  It turns out that they were there all the time - but they were looking for someone who was arriving wearing snow gear!  It seems that they thought that Canada was all snow and ice, even in the summer.  Talk about misconceptions.