Canada’s Revenue Minister, who as you know is John McCallum, scored with an April Fool’s joke this morning when he announced to the nation on a CBC radio show that the government was launching a project called “E-File or Else,” under which taxpayers would be forced to file electronically or be charged extra.
This prompted angry calls from the kind of people who are up early to listen to Canada’s Revenue Minister on talk radio and also don’t know it’s April Fool’s Day. Many protested on the grounds that they had already filed or did not have computers. McCallum apparently strung everyone along until the very end of the program before announcing “April Fools.”
Previous April Fools’ shows have featured Canadian government ministers claiming that Parliament would be replacing the clock on its “Peace Tower” with a digital readout, and U.S. cabinet officials claiming that Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.