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Canada's Toughest Border Crossing

thewalrus.ca

1–10 of 62 posts

Re: Canada's Toughest Border Crossing

#3
The article covers the issues quite well. It's hell for the people who live on either side of the border, and relations with the authorities on the Canadian side have been especially bad - in addition to the protest about CBSA border guards carrying guns earlier in the decade, there was a violent land dispute at another Mohawk reservation about 30 miles to the east in 1990 in which two people including a Quebec police officer lost their lives (http://www.rcinet.ca/en/2018/07/09/shooting-death-police-ind...).

The smuggling issue is not just something that takes place on the Akwesasne area of the St. Lawrence, either. It happens throughout the Thousand Islands.

Re: Canada's Toughest Border Crossing

#4
The policy under which they might gain the right to mobility - proof of ancestral custom - fixes in place what would have been a continually evolving aspect of historical culture. The Orenda discusses a particular huron tribe picking up their whole village, including their dead, and moving it somewhere else - a practice they would repeat every few years or so. They couldn't recall any one place to say "thats where our ancestors lived" except to point at the whole territory where they made their various villages. The policy of requiring 50% native blood seems also geared towards eventually ending this allowance, given that entropy never decreases.

Re: Canada's Toughest Border Crossing

#5
post #2

Reminds me of the Northwest Angle, which requires you to cross the Canada border to get back into a small piece of America that is self-contained within Canada. And odd piece of geographic borders: https://lakeofthewoodsmn.com/northwest-angle/

Also Point Roberts Washington. School kids are bussed daily from the US through Canada to the US, and then back again at the end of the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington#Educ...

Re: Canada's Toughest Border Crossing

#7

Seems off topic?

If you click "Guidelines" at the bottom:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Frankly, I enjoy this "topic"; people post interesting things that I would have never otherwise learned about. Particularly Wikipedia articles; for example, I learned about Pando[1], one of the largest organisms on Earth: it is an Aspen grove occupying 106 acres, but it's still a single thing. To me, that was mind blowing the first time I read it; I wouldn't have ever recognized such a thing even if I were there in person.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

Re: Canada's Toughest Border Crossing

#8

Seems off topic?

If you click "Guidelines" at the bottom: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Frankly, I enjoy this "topic"; people post interesting things that I would have never otherwise learned about. Particularly Wikipedia articles; for example,…

Pando is fascinating and would definitely be worth visiting. Another large organism that got some press recently is the "Humongous Fungus" which covers 2,385 acres of forest in Oregon and is apparently one of the oldest organisms on earth [0]. There's definitely the potential for a sci-fi movie.

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/nature/the-worlds-larg...

Re: Canada's Toughest Border Crossing

#9
There's an entertaining CGP Grey video about other oddities in the US-Canada border.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMkYlIA7mgw

Considering how inconvenient it is in some geographies and how small the patches of land are, I'm always surprised the State Department doesn't negotiate a land exchange treaty with Canada to fix what are essentially cartography bugs.

Both sides would spend a few tens of millions compensating people for land seizures and dealing with the administrative overhead of negotiating and ratifying the deal but would gain it back over time with simplified border stations.

Re: Canada's Toughest Border Crossing

#10

There's an entertaining CGP Grey video about other oddities in the US-Canada border. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMkYlIA7mgw Considering how inconvenient it is in some geographies and how small the patches of land are, I'm always surprised the State Department doesn't negotiate a land exchange treaty with Canada to fix what are essentially cartography bugs. Both sides would spend a few tens of millions compensati…

There's a fantastic film about this very plight. It's called Super Troopers 2. ;P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEed-o8fVpM (possibly nsfw)

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