Spock: Inaction Figure

'Spock Is Not a Toy'

from Sploid

The communists who run Canada held a bizarre secret "tribunal" that made ancient Egyptian religion the equal of Christianity and outlawed the marketing of Mr. Spock figurines as "toys."

Canada's International Trade Tribunal issued the sweeping rulings to stop the Franklin Mint, a U.S. trinket manufacturer, from claiming its collectibles of Star Trek characters, cartoon harlot Betty Boop and "Wizard of Oz" midgets "amuse and please" the Canadians who buy the things.

As a result, Franklin Mint can't get away with paying the lesser "toy tariff" on the exports, and instead must pay a higher duty to send the kitsch junk up north.

The once-secret proceedings also reveal the primitive conditions under which Canadian children are forced to live:

"It is common knowledge that a child will play for hours with an empty cardboard box, a paper bag or a stick. Thus, the tribunal is of the view that amusement alone does not make an object a toy for the purpose of tariff classification," said the tribunal in a report finally made public last month.

But the U.S. company did win a battle for pagans, because the Canadian tribunal ruled that Franklin Mint's cheesy copies of Egyptian pharaonic cat gods are basically the same thing as a bleeding Jesus on the cross.

"It decreed that a dead faith like ancient Egyptian deity worship should be accorded the same treatment as live religions when it comes to tariff rates," the Globe and Mail reported last week.

"This ruling means that a Franklin Mint figurine representing the Egyptian Cat goddess Bast has been reclassified as a 'religious statuette' for the purposes of border tariffs."

The border tariffs for such religious gewgaws is lower than for regular non-religious crap that Canadians are addicted to buying.

To hear Franklin Mint representative John Mark Morton tell it, Canadians are compelled to put the horrible figurines everywhere - even at their offices.

"They want to convey the idea that they are intelligent and so, you know, you have - someone comes in your office and you have this Star Trek mini bell jar [figurine] sitting on your desk and they go, 'Oh, you're a Trekkie, I'm a Trekkie too,' and it conveys a feeling that you are intelligent," Morton argued at the tribunal, which was conducted under a veil of secrecy in December.

Never before had Star Trek fanaticism been presented as a positive thing.

"Why do we have tariffs on 'religious statuettes' and collector's items at all?" asked Patrick Bowman of Toronto in comments on the Globe and Mail's website.

"Somehow I can't bring myself to belief that our own manufacturers of Canadian kitsch desperately need tariff protection from those multinational kitsch conglomerates. How much money is wasted every year with trade tribunals and enforcement of mindless regulations like this?"

A commenter from British Columbia added, "Thanks to the Canadian International Trade Tribunal I don't know whether to laugh or cry."

Other Canadians wondered why such absurd tariffs even exist when both Canada and the United States are reportedly operating under the North American Free Trade Agreement.