If you’ve bought a laptop in Canada, odds are you’ve pressed the \ key instead of [shift] more than once a day. Personally, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve done this on my laptop I’d never have to pay for computer parts again.
If you’re running a Windows install, you can tweak the registry so that both the left [shift] and the pipe/backslash key are remapped to [shift] only, making it essentially a full-sized shift key. While you can go and do this manually, I suggest running SharpKeys instead.
There’s no installation required, and it’s just a matter of downloading the ZIP file, extracting it, then running SharpKeys.
First, Click “Add”, then “Type Key” on the next window that comes up.
Next, press the key that you want to copy. In the example of the French keyboard, press the [shift] button.
Repeat on the right-hand side, but use the key that you don’t want to use anymore. That’s right: once it’s remapped it will be exceedingly difficult to return its original function, since you can’t press it to use as an example. It will likely return a “key unknown”, which is fine because this program was written by an American so they wouldn’t think about French keys.
Once you’ve selected both keys, press OK and return to the main menu. Click on “Write to Registry” and reboot. When you log back in, you can use either of those keys on the left as a [shift] button, even for entering your password.