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Canadian Border Tightens Due to Info Sharing
blu3 b0y writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that new information sharing agreements have made it as easy for a Canadian border officer to know the full criminal records of US citizens as it is for their local police. As a result, Canadian officials are turning away American visitors for ancient minor convictions, including 30-year-old shoplifting and minor drug possession convictions. Officials claim it's always been illegal to enter Canada with such convictions without getting special dispensation, they just had no good way of knowing about them until recent security agreements allowed access. One attorney speculates it's not long before this information will be shared with other countries as well, causing immigration hassles worldwide."
I don't believe for a minute that this is anything more but passive-aggressive behavior on the part of the Canadians for our treating them as we still hated them for being on the Loyalist side in the American Revolution.
I can't believe a passport is required for a trip to Canada. Canada, for gosh sakes.
All that crap I learned in school about how friendly the two countries were and how informal border formalities were and how it was the longest unguarded border in the world... and now this.
A few years ago my wife and I took our first trip to Europe, and we were concerned because our destination was The Netherlands and we were flying into Antwerp. I was saying to our friends that it was all well and good that we could save time on the flight, but I was leery of running into border formalities, especially when tired and jet-lagged. Our friends kept laughing, and saying that there was nothing at the Belgium-Netherlands border, nothing at all, not so much as a kiosk or a friendly uniformed guy to wave at us.
We didn't believe them. It was true.
We were less aware of crossing this national border than we were of crossing from Massachusetts into New York (where the pavement changes texture, and there are toll boths and big signs telling us how glad Eliot Spitzer is to see us).
Our border crossing at Niagara Falls a few years ago, where we had to wait in a line of cars for about three minutes and wave a birth certificate at an official, looked like an ordeal by comparison.
And now? Passports and background checks? Holy cow, what are things coming to? How long before we build a concrete wall?
It's a crying shame.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Is it not surprising, then, that other countries might treat your citizens in exactly the same way your Israeli-American friends treat Palestinians in their own country?
Ill finish with a proverb - treat others the way you would have them treat you.
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The standard solution to this problem in most of the world is to make a payoff to someone.
Let's see, in the USA there are roughly about %15 to %20 of the population who can't enter Canada according to these restrictions. We have at least 20-25 million people who have been arrested for possession of marijuana since it became a political crime used against the young about forty years ago. Plus another ten to twenty million people who have been arrested for minor misdemeanors over the course of their lives. Millions of these people want and occasionally need to enter Canada every few years for business.
But now they can't because of this political chickenshit. These restrictions have been in place since the Vietnam War and used against minorities like African-Americans and Euro-American hippies who show up at the border in cars. But generally, arriving by plane with a return ticket gets one into Canada without incident. But now with the computers and databases that dredge up 30-year-old residue-in-a-bong bust it becomes harder to simply ignore for the border 'police' or either country.
So, as whenever a ridiculous and absurd but unresolvable political situation comes up against reality, the same thing always happens. Corruption enters; someone gets paid-off. The 'crime' is overlooked if the price is right.
The only real questions about this situation are:
1) Whether it will be the Canadian border 'police' who will be taking and keeping the bribes on an ad-hoc basis. This turns Canada into a little Mexico, which I don't really think will happen.
2) The situation blows over with time and things go back to 'normal' where only blacks and hippies are arbitrarily and systematically denied entry into Canada for chickenshit reasons.
3) Americans will have to pay a big 'chunk of change' to get someone in the so-called Homeland Security department to 'adjust' the computer records so that the individual making the big payoff is not inconvenienced at borders. This is the most likely scenario because it matches the American obsession with money with their innate corruption. Plus it allows the 'background adjuster' to further extort money from the 'offender' at any point in the future, since making payoffs to government officials is major crime against 'national security'; right up there with residue-in-a-bong drug offenses.