It's tax time, feeling tied up in knots?

One the finest ways that advertising reveals truths about our culture is when it shows a problem in order to claim the solution to that problem for its product or service. The Canada Revenue Agency, a.k.a. Revenue Canada, for example, wants you to believe that they will make tax time so easy you won't have to have the flexibility of a gymnast to get through it, or that their online tools will make it so easy it will be as if you had the abilities of a gymnast. What the ad really tells us is "you can't do this". Go on, I dare you to try that pose.

And while we're talking about the tax dept. why'd they change the name? We used to have Heritage Canada, Industry Canada and others, names that had a professional feel and that put the title of what they were about ahead of Canada... Canada Revenue Agency is so utilitarian, opaque, bureaucratic, a gulag of naming.

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