The answer to my rhetorical question is clearly negative, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. Still, sometimes you have to wonder.<\/p>\n
Like the other day, when our fearless guardians of Canadian sovereignty, our border guards, detained and questioned a US journalist for 90 minutes<\/a>, apparently concerned that she might have something unpleasant to say about the upcoming Olympics.<\/p>\n I have no idea what they were thinking, but I am outraged. I never much liked the Olympics, but if this is the price we pay (not to mention Chinese mittens<\/a> and incessant “I believe” television commercials that sound like they have more to do with televangelism than sport) I say, screw the Olympics, let them have it somewhere else, I don’t want it in my country, not even if it’s on the other coast, 3000 miles from here. It has a lot more to do with crass commercialism and performance enhancing drugs than true sportsmanship anyway.<\/p>\n And if border guards were concerned that an American journalist might damage Canada’s Olympic image… well, she doesn’t have to. Our border guards have done a splendid job already, thank you. I suppose if it were up to them, we’d have guard dogs, mine fields, and barbed wire, too, perhaps some second hand leftover from the Berlin Wall.<\/p>\n One of these days, I’m going to have another unpleasant encounter<\/a> with them, and I am not looking forward to it. That is, one of these days, they’ll want to search my laptop, and I won’t be able to allow them to do so. That is because I will have taken the necessary precautions of carrying only a dysfunctional laptop with me, disabled by a password that I cannot retrieve. (This is necessary in order not to lie to them and to avoid not complying with their instructions.) No, I am not a kiddie porn smuggler, nor do I have any terrorist secrets or other unsavory stuff on the poor little machine. I just don’t accept the idea that a clueless border agent can rummage through my most personal material simply because I happen to be traveling internationally. To be rhetorical about it, this is not why I escaped from a Communist country 23 years ago.<\/p>\n The answer to my rhetorical question is clearly negative, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. Still, sometimes you have to wonder. Like the other day, when our fearless guardians of Canadian sovereignty, our border guards, detained and questioned a US journalist for 90 minutes, apparently concerned that she might have something unpleasant to say about […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-canada","category-politics","category-22-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1222"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1223,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222\/revisions\/1223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}