Re: Canadian Border Control screws Amish

On Mar 24, 2025 at 3:30:06 AM PDT, "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.)
 
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 downloaded when I was thinking about driving from L.A. to Anchorage in case
I had to pass through Canadia at some point and it is incredibly intrusive in
what information it requires you to give them.

The arrival of Midnight in my household has so far put that trip on hold,
however, so I never actually had to use the app.