Re: Canadian Border Control screws Amish

On Mon, 24 Mar 2025 06:30:06 -0400, Rhino
<no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

On 2025-03-24 2:07 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

According to this video, Canadian Border Patrol enforces a law requiring
Canadians to download what is essentially privacy-violating application
onto smart phones with lots of personal details including medical
records. If they don't, there's a $6,000 fine imposed including against
children.
 
Numerous Amish found they had liens imposed against their farms.
Obviously they don't use smart phones.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scrtSExvu3g

>
Just to be completely accurate, the agency that is charged with guarding
our border is the Canadian Border Services Agency, not the Canadian
Border Patrol. But even most Canadians probably don't know the proper
name so I won't hold that against you ;-)
>
As for this app that you are supposedly required to have, I've never
heard of it and definitely don't have it on *my* smart phone. I've lived
here all my life so if it really *is* mandatory, it is only mandatory
for specific people or classes of people. It may well be for frequent
border-crossers. (I haven't crossed the border to the US in 20+ years.)

Well, the name gives it away, ArriveCan. It's only applicable if you
are crossing the border. There is no fine associated with not using it
from what I can tell as it's only used to help people submit the
necessary documentation for crossing the border electronically so your
border crossing can go faster.

That said it's possible that during the COVID crisis back in 2020 they
may have wanted to use the app to help track people crossing into the
country. Ah, here is an article that talks about 190 fines being
issued for people who refused to provide their COVID-19 vaccination
information, but not for refusing to use the ArriveCan app. As the
article points out the people being fined refused to provide the
required info even by a paper submission, which is allowed.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/public-health-agency-of-canada-arrivecan-app-house-of-commons-committee-1.6556525


So if the Amish were being fined it's because they were refusing to
provide the information the government wanted to cross into the
country including information on COVID-19 vaccination status. Not for
refusing to use some app.

I know there's a system called Nexus that has some documentation
requirements which apparently puts you in a much shorter line at border
crossing points so that may be what the video is talking about. But you
can still cross without Nexus, or so I was told by a former colleague
who frequently crossed the border. You just have to deal with a much
longer line and can expect to wait several hours at times.
>
[Pause]
>
Okay, I just watched the video and they're talking about ArriveCan, not
Nexus. ArriveCan was an app the Liberals had built during Covid. They
paid many millions of dollars to get a consulting firm to build it as a
way to track people coming into the country but it subsequently came out
that two people built it in a single weekend so they must have paid
themselves very handsomely indeed - or kicked a lot of it back to some
Liberal slush fund. (It must be a mess too because it takes considerably
longer to build a robust and thoroughly tested app than a single
weekend. You might be able to build a simple UNTESTED app in that time
if you're a skilled developer but writing and running all the tests
successfully is almost unimagineable. You can't even DESIGN an app that
fast unless it is EXTREMELY trivial, let alone build and test it.) There
was a *lot* of talk about ArriveCan in the news during Covid and believe
me, it was not people praising it or the government.
>
I haven't heard about it in a while now so assumed it was no longer
required but I just found the ArriveCan web page, which was last updated
in September 2024, and it looks like the app is still around! I had
thought it was no longer required since we got past Covid but I guess
it's just fallen off the news radar....
>
As for the Amish, yes, they were indeed screwed by ArriveCan and
presumably continue to be screwed unless they've all acquired smart
phones since this app was launched. But if the Liberals did that to the
Amish, I feel sure they did it to others too. Ezra Levant really should
have done a Freedom of Information request to find out who else had this
happen to them. Rebel News is no stranger to FOI requests, although the
Liberals amended the FOI rules to give the bureaucrats MUCH more time to
produce the documents; I believe they also gave them more latitude to
redact information so it may not be possible to get much more than
blackened pages at this point.
>
Then again, maybe the Liberals really ARE that evil and deliberately
picked on the Amish alone knowing that the Amish would endure it without
making a ruckus.