In my last post, much praise was lavished upon Rock Band. Now, here’s the dirty part…

We Canadians are used to paying a little more for things. Cars always cost more north of the border, ditto for books, software, etc. Pretty much anything you can think of usually costs a little more here than it does Stateside.

The excuse for the past decade or so has been the power, or lack thereof, of the Canadian dollar vs. the ol’ U.S. greenback. Let me tell you, having been to Vegas when the dollar was at an all-time low, every chip lost on the craps table was a traumatic experience. Suddenly though, the loonie shot back up and at one point was actually valued higher than the U.S. dollar. Currently, they trade off every week or so. For the time being then, we can assume this is no longer a factor.

The other big sticking point I suppose is shipping. It generally just costs a little bit more to move things beyond the border up to the frigid north. Hell, a delivery person or two may even freeze to death in the process if he or she wasn’t smart enough to pack a parka on their trip up the eastern seaboard from Florida. Tragic, really. That may be the reason behind the original Canadian Rock Band price tag of $199.99, a full $30 above what was asked in the States. After all, that is a massive box to ship around. That extra fee is not what I’m here to gripe about.

Where all augmented Canadian price arguments seem to fall apart is when content is distributed digitally.

“A-ha!”, you say. “Now I know where he’s going with this.”

Rock Band downloadable content is a full $1.00 more per song in Canada than it is in the United States. The song packs can range anywhere from $0.50 to $1.00 more as well. What’s the justification? To be honest, I have no idea.

This is not an exclusive problem to Rock Band. A brief comparison of pricing on the Playstation Network Store or XBox Live will reveal that Canada pays more for a variety of items, from full games to picture packs. It boggles the canuck mind since bandwidth doesn’t cost more in Canada than is does in the U.S.

For this article I attempted to contact Harmonix, the makers of Rock Band, in the hopes that they could shed some light on the price discrepancy. As of the time I write this they have yet to respond. If they do, I will certainly update the article with their response. Perhaps if a more mainstream and well known media outlet were to look into the problem, they could get some answers. As far as I can tell, no one has…yet.

Grassroots protest is never a bad idea. If you feel strongly about this, as I do, you can e-mail Harmonix and let them know you’d like see equity as far as online Canadian pricing goes. Even sympathetic Americans are welcome to write. If you’d like, throw in a cc to chris@completionist.com and we’ll post your letters on the site and erect a bronze statue of your likeness in the park behind our world headquarters*.

*Bronze statues are hard to make and therefore will not be honoured. Seriously though, we’ll post your letter.