I was watching Craig Ferguson, the ex-pat Scots comic-turned-unabashed-American-flagwaver as he gently dissed Canada on the tube the other night. "To me," said Ferguson, "Canada is not the party. Canada is the apartment above the party."

Some truth to that. We Canucks are a tad stodgy - if you're comparing us to the East Village, San Francisco's Castro or Rodeo Drive. But if your American reference is Boise, Idaho, greater Wyoming or downtown Bubba, Texas, Canada is kilometres ahead on the hipster scale. We're Errol Flynn crossed with Frieda Kahlo compared to most of backwater America. H.L. Mencken was closer to the mark when he said: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

Or so I used to think. A couple of stories in the news last week made me re-evaluate the trans-border IQ comparison. The first story comes from the Los Angeles Times. It's headlined AMERICANS TURN TO TAP AS BOTTLE WATER PRICES GET HARD TO SWALLOW. The story relates how U.S. consumers have finally twigged to the realization that bottled water is the biggest con since Enron. Maybe bigger. Americans shelled out a jaw-dropping $16.8 billion for bottled water last year - this for a product they could get from the kitchen tap for free.

Okay, not for free, but for pennies a year. Anybody who gets their daily water intake in Dasani or Aquafina bottles is spending thousands annually. For water.

And Americans have finally figured it out. They've realized that bottled water is not only no healthier than tap water, it IS tap water in many cases. Dasani? Bottled by Coca Cola. Aquafina? Brought to you by PepsiCo. And both are drawn directly from municipal water supplies. People who drink Dasani or Aquafina get to pay for it twice - once through their taxes, then again at the checkout counter.

But Dasani and Aquafina are the McDonalds and Taco Bell of bottled waters. Consumers who are truly discriminating prefer premium brands, brands that might be distilled, decanted, oxygenated, de-ionized or even osmosis reversed. They may, their labels will claim, have been captured from remote glaciers, diverted from sparkling mountain streams or, as in the case of New Zealand's best selling 'Eternal' artesian water "filtered through layers of volcanic rock where it has collected for a millennia (sic)"

Still just water, folks.

Not that you'd guess from the price tag. A single glass of Evian water at Claridge's in London will add five quid to your tab. You can pay $33:50 for two ounces of MaHaLo, a desalinated seawater brand bottled in Hawaii. (Mind you, that's a concentrate. You have to dilute it before you indulge. Which means you must add water to your...er...water.

But hell, let's assume you're a fabulously successful Colombian drug lord - or even a cabinet minister with a government expense account. In that case, you'll be wanting a chilled bottle of BlingH2O sent over to your table. That really is the brand name and it really is available at finer watering holes everywhere. It'll only set you back $480 for a special-edition 750 millilitre bottle. That's roughly a million times more than you pay when you draw the same product from your kitchen faucet.

But as I say, the Americans, those gullible souls, have finally figured it out. The worm has turned. The penny has dropped. They've seen the light.

Which brings me to the second news story that caught my eye. It's headlined CANADIANS SHUN TAP, TURN TO BOTTLED WATER. The story is about a Statistics Canada survey which shows that three in 10 Canadian households reported drinking bottled water in their homes. Why - safety? Few products are safer than North American tap water. As Washington Post correspondent Shankar Vedantam writes: "The supply of clean drinking water is an underappreciated scientific and technological achievement that rivals putting a man on the moon. Trillions of dollars have been spent to get clean drinking water to people at virtually no cost."

Taste? Tests have shown again and again that if you take away the labels most consumers can't tell tap from bottled water. Convenience? What can be more convenient than strolling to the kitchen sink, twisting your wrist and chugalugging as much as you want? Even Neil Rothwell, author of the StatsCan report, confesses to being buffaloed. "Something is driving these households to drink bottled water."

Now what could that be? Einstein famously said: "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

Can I buy you a drink, Albert?