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Perhaps the biggest difference between the United States and Canada (or at least in Quebec and Ontario) isn’t universal health care, the metric system or a parliamentary system of governance. It’s milk.

South of the border, milk is served in large, plastic gallon — sorry, 3.89 litre — jugs with a screw top. But in Ontario and Quebec, the beverage that does your body good comes in litre-sized plastic bags.

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Proponents of the bagged method argue it spoils less easily, since you only need to open one litre at a time, and that individual bags are much less heavy than three- or four-litre jugs.

But for those who grew up in the land of the free, the bags seem downright socialist.

“It’s about this weird government regulation of stuff … I don’t get it at all,” says Steve Saideman, the Paterson Chair in International Affairs at Carleton University, who’s originally from the U.S. “There’s some sort of perverse logic about protecting the marketplace.”