On the Density of Finance Ministers

You have to wonder what Flaherty was thinking when he took The Deathly Hallows as his poster example of price disparities between Canadian and U.S. merchants. It's not just that, as people were quick to point out, he could have found heavily-discounted copies had he searched a bit farther -- that was largely irrelevant to his point, since (1) the comparison then should have been against a heavily-discounted US copy, not a full-price one and (2) you can find a heavily-discounted copy of HP but not of, say, Design Patterns (except insofar as you take the Amazon price, but then you have to compare Amazon to Amazon -- $47.24(CDN) to $40.19(US)). (The dollar was trading above 1.04 US today.)

The more relevant point is that unlike books by, say, Addison Wesley or Tor or the like, HP is published in Canada by a Canadian publisher and they set the price -- it's not done by an exchange rate calculation. Further, the plates used are not those of the US edition, but rather those of the Bloomsbury edition. The two are not two equivalent apples to compare (and the kid who's building a nicely symmetrical library of Raincoast editions will not be pleased if his/her parental unit brings home a Scholastic edition picked up on a business trip).