Brian,
The houses we lived in in Manitoba had plastic switch plates. Now, I am not gonna say that was the norm in CA, 'cause I honestly don't know...
One of the saner things about CA is that, on the whole, there is less variation in lots of stuff--food, hardware etc. What I mean is, for example, if you go down supermarket store cereal aisle in the US you find 405 varieations on cereal, most of it sugar laden crap. In a Canadian market there might only be 75 choices of sugar laden crap<g>