Want to win a chance to spend a day with Bono in Montreal? If you live in Montreal, or anywhere else in Quebec, tough luck – the contest isn’t open to you.
Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte teamed up with Prizeo, a website for contests with a philanthropic bent, and U2 to offer up a day with the band, VIP tickets to one of the shows on their iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE tour with an exclusive backstage tour and a tour of the Cirque du Soleil headquarters.
It’s all to benefit Laliberte’s One Drop organization, which aims to provide safe and sanitary water to people living in Central America, India and West Africa.
But if you read the fine print, you’ll find that residents of “certain countries” are barred from entering the contest due to “local sweepstakes laws and compliance legislation,” it reads.
Those countries are Burma/Myanmar, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Yemen all African nations with the exception of South Africa… and Quebec.
For those who make a habit of entering contests, this news won’t come as a shock.
Quebec has strict and specific rules for contests where the total value of the prizes offered exceeds $2,000. The province says the rules were designed to protect consumers.
Companies sponsoring any sweepstakes Quebecers are eligible to enter must, for example, pay a fee of up to 10 per cent of the sweepstakes' value, depending on who can enter.
When asked to comment on the contest rules, One Drop issued a statement essentially repeating what is in the contest's fine print.
"This contest, like many others, unfortunately does not conform to Quebec law and so excludes Quebec residents,” said cief marketing officer Pascal Chandonnet.
