CBC News: Canada may retaliate against new U.S. border rules
Canada may retaliate against new U.S. border rules
Last Updated Tue, 05 Apr 2005 18:58:32 EDT
CBC NewsWASHINGTON – In response to a new rule requiring most Canadians to carry passports for entry into the U.S., Public Security Minister Anne McLellan said Americans may also have to carry the document to enter Canada.
“Our system has really always worked on the basis of reciprocity,” McLellan said outside the House of Commons.
“And therefore we will review our requirements for American citizens and we’re going to do that in collaboration with the United States
Here’s my thinking about this. The US government does not want US
citizens coming back to the US to take away jobs from hard working
illegal aliens! — Ima Fish
The “Legal” visitors will be the ones inconvenienced. The illegal visitors with nefarious purposes will continue to enter the United States with little problem. If the concept is to make border crossings difficult, then these new regulations may just succeed.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. travelers to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda will need passports to return to the United States by 2008 under a new terrorism prevention policy, American officials said on Tuesday.
“We want folks to think about their travel to and from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda as equivalent to taking a trip to Europe or Asia,” said Elaine Dezenski, the Department of Homeland Security’s acting assistant secretary for border and transportation security policy.
Sixty million U.S. citizens now hold passports, and the State Department issued 8.8 million passports in 2004. To meet the need for more passports, passport agencies will add 500 people to their current staff of 1,100, a State Department official said.
This is brought to you by the Department of Homeland Insecurity
The rest of the industrial world works at expanding civilized behavior, whether it concerns privacy, health care and medical research, freedom to travel and international education. They still manage to have sensible programs in place to deal with crime and terror.
The thug in the White House decides to make it more difficult for the law-abiding to cross borders while not caring a jot about illegal immigrants. Our lemming electorate hardly notices.
OK, anyone who has travelled in and out of the USA in the last couple years realizes that the airport security measures are an annoying and pointless joke. So, you guys would feel better about the billions we’ve spent on airport security if you viewed it from the perspective of a massive jobs program for low-skilled workers, along with an influx of cash for struggling hi-tech manufacturers. From that point of view it makes some kind of sense. We put up with it to keep these people employed. Plus, where would you rather have those young soldiers – in the airport? or in Iraq?
A friend had a great comment about this. If Jeb gets elected in 2008, let’s all go to Canada and “lose” our passports!
My wife and I are going up to Vancouver & Victoria for a week, and so we got passports “just in case”.
Temping to leave them at home, so we could be “stuck” in Canada.
This is so stupid. Canada and the US have always had a pretty cordial relationship (you know, unless you work in the softwood lumber industry) and a driver’s license and birth certificate have always been more than enough. It is stupid to change this for no reason.
Passports are expensive and annoying to get. And now there’s word that they are going to make them biometric http://news.ft.com/cms/s/af8ae978-a637-11d9-b67b-00000e2511c8.html
which is a ridiculous invasion of privacy – just to make the States happy.
The US government is ruling by terror. They are using it as an excuse to throw up any and all walls through legislation and protocol that is billed as making Americans safer but really will do no such thing. Yeah, you’d all be safer if you lived in bomb shelter’s too, but people can actually see how pointless that is.
All that’s happening now is people are invading our privacy – again. Do you really want your government to have all of your DNA on file in a big database somewhere? To you really want it available to a clever hacker? Do you want your identity stolen by someone that can fake your genetics? (Yes, I know, that last one isn’t possible – yet.)