"talk about the law of unintended consequences." How long we been waiting on those id cards now? Anyways I prefer security, as does every other American. If you wanna sue us go ahead, when it gets to a US judge he will throw it out and ask what part of 9/11 you don't understand. I find it amazaing you can take offense to this after having 4+ years to work on security issues.

pseudo it's a nafta provision so an american judge won't have jurisdiction to toss it out. what is offensive about the thing is that it's a genuine pita and it's not going to do a damn thing toward securing the border. to cross the border you need either a passport or an as yet non existant id card. i have serious doubts the american version of the card is going to be ready by the deadline much less ours. worse every single one of those gomers had a passport so all this extra security wouldn't have stopped the planes.

had a customer pop in and had to cut it short. my grief with this id card thing is that it's expensive, inconvenient and worst of all very dubiously worthwhile. in order to cross the border you need to show a passport. to get on an airplane to canada you need to show a passport. therefore every swinging dick that gets off an airplane is able to cross the border. am i missing something here in the way of security improvements from the status quo?

Ehran, I travel to the US on business a number of times a year and also for vacation. The fact is the US like any other country is well within its rights to demand passports or tougher ID than just a Driver's Licence and Birth Certificate, the current state of things for Canadians. It has meant a great deal of trade has occurred both north and south. However, in the post 9/11 world, Canadians need to wakeup and smell the coffee. Too much head in the sand ostrich stuff for my liking. Yes it will be a pain to get a passport, and cost, etc., but it should also make movement to and from the US a lot easier. It's a new world out there and while we all probably would like the status quo to continue, this is simply not an option as the US rightfully so tries to increase their security.

the question is does this actually improve security at all? given you have to have a passport to get on a plane to canada it doesn't seem to improve things appreciably. i mean if you for some reason think you might be turned away at the border or busted there are several thousand miles of border you can simply walk across at your leisure. i can certainly see why they want to increase their security levels but this is going to have definite costs for both countries and i just don't see the benefits coming anywhere near the costs even for the us much less canada. the casual traffic across the border is worth billions of dollars a year in trade and the lost tourism/snowbirds would have to be many times that.

To be sure there is a gamble for the US. They get a LOT of Canadian visitors during the winter months - a quick review of Florida would prove that in spades - along with many other states like CA, AZ, NM, etc. Then of course there are the summer holidays to places like Disneyland, Disney World, etc. that also generate a lot of revenue. As you pointed out, there is also the cross border trade that is also extremely large in the way of day and weekend shopping trips, etc. However, the administration and I dare say even the democrats put security #1, and trade second. The interesting thing is when I have travelled through the US the airport people have always been interested in our holograph type and plastic covered driver's licences, which in many ways are harder to forge than a passport. Still wondering what the ID the US Administration is thinking of is going to finally be.

http://www.eubusiness.com/Living_in_EU/050615163146.a4vf7gdp "US delays biometric passports for 27 countries until 2006 Document Actions 15/06/2005 The US government announced Wednesday that it will delay for one year until October 2006 the introduction of compulsory biometric passports for travelers from 27 countries in Europe and Asia-Pacific. All 27 countries -- which include Australia, Britain, Japan and Singapore -- have visa waiver agreements with the United States. Under the orginal US plan, travelers without the new passports could have been barred or forced to get a visa after October 26 this year. The United States considerably strengthened immigration checks after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. The new biometric passports carry a chip which has facial images and fingerprints of the carrier. But the European Union had urged US authorities to put back its planned October 26 deadline for the 27 visa waiver countries to introduce the passports. Europe was mainly behind a first delay in introducing the new system from 2004 to 2005." This about the EU, couldn't find anything discussing the US Canada biometrics passport situation, but the issue is as stated above. First it was 2004 for biometric passports, then 2005, now 2006, and guess what, they're still arguing for more delays.

well as far as inconveniencing me it's not going to appreciably. i used to go across the border a block a couple times a year to buy chocolate milk. the lineups at the border got long enough i pretty much quite doing that even as a walk across thing. it does depend on what kind of card they develop and more importantly how much of a hassle it is to get one. the casual shopper isn't going to bother i expect. business and snowbirds will get what they have to in order to cross so i wouldn't expect any big losses there. mostly this strikes me as a bad case of being seen to be doing something as opposed to actually doing something useful.

"mostly this strikes me as a bad case of being seen to be doing something as opposed to actually doing something useful." Yes why would anyone want a computer chip in a passport to assure the man using it is really that guy or not? I cannot fathom why anyone would want to switch away from the easily forged passports currently in use, certainly not if it will affect your chocolate buying.

thing is pseudo that requiring new and improved passports and id cards simply isn't going to produce any worthwhile benefits at least in regard to canada and the us. if i was trying to get into the states to do something nefarious it wouldn't be very difficult to slide across a border somewhere illegally. the states has a crapload of coastline which is pretty easily infiltrated and thousands of miles of border with canada which is virtually unwatched. the border with mexico is tighter but still far from adequate much less good. none of these things are going to change in the least because of the passport/id requirements. all this will do is increase the hassles for law abiding types. it won't matter diddly to me as i don't travel any more over my back being screwed up. i do however miss my yankee choco milk fix. one thing i can tell you is that i don't know anyone nowadays that crosses into washington state to shop any more. i used to know a few people who did that but the border crossing got to be enough of a hassle they said the heck with it. all this "increase" in security is going to do is cost people jobs on both sides of the border. which won't matter of course to the elected cretins getting their names in the paper.