A bunch of confused people spent the Super Bowl berating the CRTC and Bell for not airing American commercials

A bunch of confused people spent the Super Bowl berating the CRTC and Bell for not airing American commercials

Last night’s Super Bowl will go down in history as one of the most suspenseful ever, but the vast majority of the game was pretty boring. The Patriots’ stunning rally didn’t take place until the last few minutes of the fourth quarter, so until that point the most entertaining parts of the evening were the commercial breaks.

Expectations for those commercial breaks were especially high in Canada this year, because of a 2015 CRTC ruling that officially banned the hated practice of Super Bowl “simultaneous substitution,” where a Canadian telecom (in this case Bell) swaps out all the big-budget American commercials for less impressive Canadian ones. What many viewers didn’t understand, though, is that the CRTC ruling applied only to the Canadian broadcast of the American feed on Fox. Any Canadians who watched the Super Bowl on CTV saw only Canadian commercials.

How do we know that lots of people didn’t understand the intricacies of the CRTC ruling? Because some of them spent the evening spewing misguided insults at the CRTC’s Twitter account. Observe.

Some of the tweets took the form of innocent inquiries:

Others were more exasperated in tone:

Some doubted the manhood of the CRTC’s regulatory enforcers:

There was widespread heartbreak:

Such heartbreak:

And much cursing:

Things got really crazy around 8:20 p.m., when some viewers of the American feed saw an incongruous Pizza Pizza commercial mixed in with all the American ads:

People hated that Pizza Pizza ad:

Some viewers were convinced that Bell was in the wrong:

But the general sentiment is best summed up right here: