Bye, Snowbirds!

Canadians Young And Old Avoid The U.S.

The mood towards the United States grows darker by the day for Canadians.

We are a patient people, not prone to vitriol and hate. But we’re proud of being Canadian and we get justifiably angry at disrespect.

Now, we are showing it in many ways; we’re “buying Canadian” in grocery stores; we are preparing to pivot our trading relationship away from the U.S. as much as we can and find new trading routes and partners elsewhere; we are aligning our foreign policy more towards Europe and the European Union than ever before.

And we’re cancelling plans to cross the border.

Let me relate a story about border crossing that occurred to me and my wife at the time, back in 2015.

We were living in idyllic Niagara on the Lake which is situated at the mouth of the Niagara River as it flows out into Lake Ontario. On the other side of the Niagara River, a distance of about 800 yards, maybe a little more, is the United States.

It was nothing for residents of Niagara on the Lake (aka, NOTLers) to “jump the ditch”, referring to crossing the border, because it was so damn close, straightforward and convenient. Those with NEXUS cards could be across the border and in the U.S. in 25 minutes. Including the red lights in Niagara Falls.

We were so used to crossing without issue, a direct result of two friendly nations living next to each other in peace for 200 years or more.

Anyway, it was August, a nice, warm, sunny summer day – a Saturday, I recall – and traffic at the Fort Erie border crossing was typically busy. This worried me because I was dropping my wife at Buffalo International Airport to catch a flight to Arizona.

We waited patiently in our queue and finally, our car was the next in line to be waved up for inspection.

To the left of the driver’s side were several tall, yellow cement bollards. Same for the right side.

As I grew more and more frustrated at the delay with the American-plated car ahead at the booth, I inched my vehicle forward, just beyond the yellow bollards. Maybe five inches beyond.

We waited some more. Suddenly, the CBP guard waves us forward to a stop sign halfway between our position and his.

Finally, I said, we’re getting somewhere.

Remember, this is 2015, well before Trump descended on his golden escalator to save America from voracious, dishonest nations like Canada.

Buddy from Connecticut finally pulls away and the guard signals us to approach. He asks for our passports which we present; he asks us where we’re going. To the airport. He asks us how long we plan to stay. My wife is going for a week, I say. I’m returning after I drop her off.

Then, the bombshell: “You set off an alarm back there so I’m holding your passports and you have to go over there.” He waves vaguely off to our right.

“What? What happened?” I ask?

“Go over there.”

“You mean over by the guy beside the Ford Explorer?”

“No! Over there!” He couldn’t have been more intentionally vague if he’d tried.

Frustrated, we drove over to the Ford Explorer. This CBP guard glared at us like we were way out of line to approach him.

“Excuse me. The guard back there told us to come over here but I’m not sure where we’re supposed to go,” I said in a friendly manner.

“Park over there,” he growled – and I mean growled.

“Then what?”

“Go through door number 3.” I kid you not. Door number 3.

We did as we were told largely because these guys were not friendly at all and we knew enough not to mess with them.

We park and enter “door number 3”. What followed was no game show, though.

A long, curving bank of glass behind which sat more CBP guards greeted us. It was like walking into an old fashioned bank except these tellers wore uniforms and looked very unpleasant.

Still not sure what we were there for or what we were supposed to do next, I walked up to one of the guards and asked, politely, what should we do now?

“Go and sit over there!” he exclaimed as if it was obvious to even a moron.

So we sat and watched bowling on the wall mounted TV. Paint drying would have been more entertaining. Or darts.

After 10 minutes, another guard finally approached us, an odd looking device in his hand. By this time, we’d been held at the border for half an hour and my wife’s flight was leaving in an hour.

This guy was at least halfway pleasant and when I asked what we had done, he responded that we had triggered a radiation alarm.

“How?” I asked, totally bewildered. Radiation alarm? Where?

“Back at the bollards,” he answered and then he began to scan us with the device. I realized in an instant that it was a Geiger counter and he was checking us for radiation residue or something. Did he think we were terrorists?

We waited while he walked outside to scan our car, telling us not to worry about it, that we’d make the flight, no problem.

After a further 20 minutes of waiting, I got up and walked to the door he’d left by to see if I could spot him. Another guard, sitting in a chair at the door, gave me the same stare as if to say, “where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Just want to see where the other guard was,” I replied.

“Go and sit down,” he snapped.

As I turned to walk away, I spotted the Geiger counter guy leaning against our car, shooting the breeze with another CBP colleague.

Eventually, he came back in, handed us our passports and told us to have a nice day.

Off we went, still wondering what the hell had happened. We made it to the airport in the nick of time only to discover that my wife’s flight had been delayed by 45 minutes.

You might think all’s well that ends well. But we were left with a very sour taste in our mouths.

That long-winded tale is the prologue to this story in the New York Times earlier this week.

More and more tourists entering the United States, particularly Canadians, are being harassed and delayed at the border, often for hours at a time.

Recently, the President of the United States decreed via one of his infamous executive orders, that Canadians and others entering the U.S. to stay longer than 30 days must register with border officials and be fingerprinted.

Trump is using an existing but seldom deployed immigration law on Canadians and it has come as a real surprise to those who still plan to cross the border. There is absolutely no certainty that registering will automatically guarantee entry, by the way.

Even if a Canadian is only planning a shopping trip, as was the case with many from Niagara on the Lake and elsewhere, back in the day, trouble could quickly brew up.

The rhetoric from Trump has been so malevolent that the flow of Canadians to America has dried up and it’s impacting airlines in a major way.

Canadian airlines like Air Canada, West Jet and discount flyer, Flair, have eliminated thousands of seats to the U.S. just for the moth of April alone.

United has cancelled a proposed daily flight from Toronto to Los Angeles and is drastically reducing the number of flights – not just seats – to Canada.

There was a time (now fading into the distant past) when both Canadians and Americans needed only a valid driver’s licence to cross the longest, undefended border in the world.

Those days are history now. And there are very few “jumping the ditch” anymore.

Such a shame.