I was informed by a friend yesterday of something a little odd: The SNES Classic Edition is, currently, illegal to sell in Quebec, Canada.
People who have placed pre-orders with addresses in Quebec began receiving notices that their orders would not be shipped to QC addresses, and would be canceled as a result, alongside Canadian outlets stating that SNES Classic editions would ship on September 23rd, but not to Quebec.
The reason, apparently, is due to laws in Quebec that require products like this to have menus in French. The SNES Classic Edition apparently only has menus in English, and thus violates the law and is being blocked for sale due to violation of the laws in question. My source tells me these laws are for anti-discrimination and given the history of Quebec and the rest of Canada, this makes perfect sense, and a situation like this is an unfortunate side effect of such rather than any kind of hostile action on the part of Quebec.
Hopefully Nintendo will fix this issue, if even just for units intended for Quebec. It is doubtful, and I see other sources denying this, but you never know. To that end, like anything else the console could be purchased via secondary markets like eBay by anyone in Quebec, but this still means fighting the very same secondhand market that is always a nightmare for these kinds of things, and doing such during the holidays.
Some sources are saying Nintendo themselves are choosing not to sell the console there as a side effect of these requirements, but I don’t quite think that’s how this is playing out. It isn’t that they don’t want to sell it there, it’s that they can’t sell it there and thus, they won’t spend resources on marketing in an area where the product, as it exists, is blacklisted. So, when you look this up and find that one “GameRant” article, take it with a grain of salt, as they say, as you should every article you read.
We will see what happens.
http://beta.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1051699/nintendo-snes-quebec-pas-disponible-francais