Does anyone know - i suppose loads of you know really daft question! If I get my pay as you go mobile on virgin network unlocked will it work in CA?

Dont bother. Its probabl more cost effective to get a new $50 cheapo virgin canada phone instead.

I think this has come up so often there is a wiki article. (actually there isnt, but there should be, there are a lot of threads if you search for them)

Basically the only people operating on GSMthingy here are Rogers, and they arent worth the hassle.

An extract of my post from this thread

We elected to go the route of Rogers Pay-as-you-go sims for our unlocked UK GSM phones because we were not up to speed on the options available and what our usage might be in our new lives.
In the UK we had monthly contracts with free minutes which we pretty much used up.

Our Rogers plan is $0.34 per minute daytime and $0.01 per min eves and weekends. Outgoing and incomming.(There are other plans). We buy $20 airtime each month as the top-up expires after 30 days. Sometimes we have lost our credit as the time has lapsed! We will now buy a $100 credit to keep the phone and credit active for a year. We will do this because we are findng that we use less than $20 per month as local landline calls are free so are used way more.

Our long distance calls, both national and international, are done through Skype where some are free (Skype -in) and others a reasonable cost (Skype-out).

In time we might get monthly contracts but at this time it really does not pay us to when one looks at all the contracts on offer and takes things like monthly connection fees of $8/9 on top of your monthly airtime!!!
We also use text messages (SMS messaging) quite a bit too. Costs are about $0.10 local and $0.20 international.

There is going to be a new Service Provider later this year and the hope is that they will break the monopoly (collusion) of the current providers and thus bring down the costs. Cells phones in Canada are a MAJOR rip off. Beware when roaming in the USA - some networks charge $3/4 per minute and remember you pay for incoming calls too.

For now we are happy with our setup and will wait and see what happens later this year.

Rob.

Thanks for the info about a possible new provider Rob.
Waiting to use all the features of my 3g phone (like Video Calling).

As long as you can buy a SIM card you'll be fine (Bell don't use SIM cards ), I use my UK phone with a Rogers SIM card on a PAYG and it works great, expensive though.