If you’re a business in Canada with employees, every month you have to send Canada Revenue Agency “source deduction remittances” — monies for Canada Pension, Employment Insurance and Income Tax that are deducted from employees’ monthly pay-cheques combined with the matching employer contributions.

These payments are due on the 15th of the following month. And so on October 3, 2007 I sent in a cheque for the September 2007 remittances:

Canada Post tells me that it should take 4 days to deliver a letter from Charlottetown to Ottawa; I had a window of 7 business days, so in theory everything was okay.

Today in the mail, however, I received a “Notice of Assessment” from Canada Revenue Agency:

The $141.21 penalty on that form was brand new (the $362.82 is an earlier penalty — these guys are the bane of my existence). I called the toll-free number, waited on hold for a few minutes, and then talked to a very pleasant gentleman who informed me that they hadn’t processed my payment until October 19th — 4 days after the deadline.

When I told him that I’d mailed the cheque on October 3rd, he said that didn’t matter — they don’t consider the payment “received” until they receive it. And they didn’t receive it until 12 business days after I sent it. So they applied a penalty.

He went on to suggest that I should consider not using the mail to send in my monthly cheque (something that would seem at odds with the fact that they include a return envelope with every statement they send) and instead pay either at my bank or online (something that, alas, my local Credit Union doesn’t yet support).

While I could appeal the penalty, he advised against doing so because remedies are only offered in extraordinary circumstances (I know this; I’ve appealed twice before, with one penalty waived and one kept in place; both took months to process).

I don’t begrudge payroll remittances, and I understand the need to get them paid on time. I even understand penalties — if they didn’t have them, nobody would ever pay on time, and their accounts payable would quickly run into the billions.

But it seems fundamentally broken when one branch of the federal government, Canada Revenue Agency, recommends against using the services of another branch, Canada Post. If the mail isn’t a reliable way of communicating, then Canada Revenue Agency shouldn’t include envelopes, and should clearly advise against using Canada Post and provide a greater variety of alternative payment methods.

In any case, I’m out $141.21 for doing nothing but assuming that federal systems should work as they say they do.

And, yes, I’ve written about this before.

From the CBC story:

Van Loan also said if a snap election were to be called before the issue is resolved, the chief electoral officer has assured him that he’s prepared to use “his adaptation power to ensure that no Canadian loses their right to vote” in the ensuing election.

Adaptation power? I’m intrigued.

In an attempt that I dramatized here, I dropped in on the weekly Plazes Product Forum in Berlin this morning via Skype videochat. While it was a great idea in theory, the technical side of the operation was such that while the audio was sufficient to get a sense of the room, the audio was muffled to the point where everyone sounded like they had socks in their mouths.

This is understandable, as the setup was simply a PC with a camera and a standard computer mic in a room with smooth echo-inducing walls.

iChat — which I think would have had better echo-cancellation — didn’t work on the spur of the moment because of firewall issues; the Skype connection was dead simple to set up.

So I seem the advice of the readership as to best practices for low-cost, Mac-friendly, higher-quality IP video-conferencing, with a focus on maximizing audio quality in a small room with up to 10 people gathered around a table.

Since I reported on our attendance at the Speaker’s Reception earlier in the week, I’ve learned that, in fact, this was an invitation only even. So, technically-speaking, Oliver and I crashed the event. Party crashing is also a good skill for children to learn.

Catherine and I are, in most ways, of completely opposite sensibilities and temperament. Our relationship works, thus, more because of “hybrid vigor” than anything else.

But there are a few points where we are completely in sync (which is probably equally required for relationship success).

Send us both, alone, into a new city with a camera and the photos we end up taking will have considerable overlap; we tend to focus on the same shiny bits (although Catherine is more obsessed with doors than I could ever be).

Another example: earlier this month we had our 16th anniversary (living in sin as we are, it’s the 16th anniversary of our first kiss, not of the marriage-we-don’t-have). We both ended up ordering an iPod Touch for the other; I placed an order online for hers and she ordered mine from Little Mac Shoppe.

When it became clear that the ship date for Catherine’s wasn’t going to make our anniversary deadline, I cancelled my online order and opted for an alternative palette of gifts that included giant twist ties (must be seen to be believed). But, unwilling to let the idea die completely, I stopped by Little Mac Shoppe myself, thus perhaps inducing some privacy conundrums as they knew full-well that Catherine had already ordered what I was looking for (they handled it well).

Catherine ended up persevering through the shipment deadlines and ended up pickup up an iPod Touch for me on her trip to Toronto last week. So this morning I got to place with the new-fangled pinch-n-slide interface while Catherine, alas, was left to play with her giant twist ties, needle threader and collapsing Japanese pen box.

News just in on the wire that National Road Network 2.0 has been released. For the uninitiated, the NRN is:

…the representation of a continuous accurate centerline for all non-restricted use roads in Canada (5 meters or more in width, drivable and no barriers denying access) to which will be added a set of basic attributes, street name, place name and block face address ranges.

In non-map-geek terms this means a high-quality royalty-free digital road map of Canada.

For anyone interested in GIS, map-hacking and similar pursuits, the NRN is an amazing dataset. That it’s made freely available for any use is a dramatic departure from usual practice with government data in Canada, where we usually have to pay for data that is, by all rights, already “ours.”

Locally here in Prince Edward Island, Dan MacDonald and his team at the Department of Transportation and Public Works deserve the credit for leading the PEI contribution to the project. What’s more, the PEI dataset is being used for the NRN 2.0 demo dataset and is available as a Google Earth-compatible KML file, which means that viewing the data is as easy as grabbing a single file and loading it into Google Earth:

Prediction: the Timothy Chaisson song all over again will be used as closing credits power ballad on a prime-time television U.S. program in the next 12 months. You heard it hear first.

After school today, Oliver and I went to get hair cuts at Ray’s Place (we hadn’t been since the day before he graduated from kindergarten in the spring), then went to Tai Chi Gardens for a late, late lunch, and then finally, on the way home, we stopped by the Confederation Centre of the Arts for the Speaker’s Reception following the opening of the fall session of the Legislative Assembly.

Oliver may be afraid to go down a slide at the playground, and have an aversion to playing “What Time Is It Mr. Wolf,” but he is a natural in social settings, and managed to wrangle himself a tour through the receiving line not once but twice. He also made cold introductions to several people in line, shaking hands and telling them his name, and generally catching them unawares.

The Speaker’s Reception was, unfortunately I think, almost entirely the preserve of adults. Other than Oliver, age 7, and the members of the Colonel Gray Jazz Band, there was almost nobody under 30. If kids are going to grok democracy, I think it would be good to have them deeply integrated into things like this.

In any case, the child-free nature of the event meant that Oliver had all the adults to himself. And so when Premier Robert Ghiz and his wife Kate walked in, Oliver knew it was time to make his move. After making introductions and shaking hands, we left the the Premier to greet others; Oliver, however, felt it important to make another swing around on the way out, and managed to convey that he is 7 years old, attends Prince Street School and, I believe, something about how he has plans to rearrange our living room tonight.

On the way home he suddenly realized that he’d forgotten to tell the Premier about his new computer game and also to seek the Premier’s counsel on what adult computer games he enjoys. It was all I could do to steer him home with the promise that he would be free to query the Premier on these weighty matters on his next encounter.

Some days there is just no doubting that you live in Prince Edward Island.

We recorded the first episode of The Plazes Podcast last week, focusing on an upgrade to Plazes.com that went live on Friday. This was my first podcast edited completely with GarageBand, which worked surprisingly well. It’s also my first attempt at hosting podcast files on Amazon S3, which is also working surprisingly well.

The whole experience reminds me, though, of wise words I read recently from a prolific podcaster; he suggested that if you open the door to doing anything other than simply wrapping up raw audio in an MP3 — in other words if you decide to do any editing at all, from “um” deletion to trimming down for clarity — you’ve got to be prepared to put in some time.

It only took us 30 minutes to record the podcast (I recorded Skype using Audio Hijack Pro); to edit it down to the 18 minutes it ended up at, with intro, extro and my voiceovers edited in, to convert to MP3 and AAC, and to set up a podcast feed and hosting, took about 6 hours all told.

Oh, and apparently in Germany you say “places” when you read “plazes”. Here in Charlottetown we say “plazes” to rhyme with “blazes.”

Helpful reader Mike pointed out that the RSS feed for comments for this website haven’t been working properly since August 17th. I’ve fixed the problem — this will teach me to carelessly modify database tables without thinking of The Implications — and all should be back to normal now. Thanks, Mike.