Customized US laptops unable to be shipped to Canada - what the ____ HP?!

Hey all,

I'm hoping some of the more industry connected forum members may be able to answer this as it's driving me to bang my head against the wall repeatedly until it bleeds.

HP are unable to ship customized laptops to Canada if they are purchased through the HP US site and so re-direct you to the HP Canadian site in order to make a purchase, *however*, HP provides no facility on their Canadian site to customize laptops and the pre-built offerings have terrible default hardware selections. Additionally all of their Canadian laptops ship with French bilingual keyboards...this is a non-standard keyboard layout with a few extra keys and French accents printed on most of the keys. For people like myself who prefer regular US layout keyboards this is huge issue.

My choices are somewhat limited:

• Ship the laptop to a friend in the US and have him ship it to me in Canada. Caveat = Customs charges
• Drive down to the US from where I live and make a purchase. Caveats = Long and costly drive and there's no facility to customize a laptop from a retail store.

Questions:

1. Why does HP shaft their Canadian customers like this?
2. Why on earth do Canadian laptops (in general, not specifically HP but I'm pointing my finger at them) ship with bilingual keyboards? In western Canada English is spoken primarily, it seems to me that laptop makers are trying to accommodate to a tiny percentage of the Canadian population with these French keyboards and pissing off all others that speak English. What gives?!
3. How can I purchase a customized laptop and have it sent to Canada?