Thanks to our subservient political relationship with our Southern allies, Canadians will have some significantly decreased privacy rights in the next little while when it comes to crossing the border.

The States and Canada have agreed that they will begin sharing more personal information about border crossers. This means that American customs inspectors will have access to every Canadian’s income tax records – and that, eventually, there will be a shared database for this purpose. Supposedly, this is to aid in determining who’s got “dodgy” finances and might, therefore, pose a threat in some way. Apparently, you might have some difficulty crossing over into the States if you’re unemployed.

In addition, border crossers are going to be rated on a scale of 1 to 10, based on how much of a possible security threat they pose – with those at the lower end of the scale being considered harmless, while those at the upper end get watched very carefully. The US will also start (this Summer) assigning people “colours” based on this rating. Just as they currently have different colours for different levels of terrorist alerts, border crossers will be coded as green, orange, or red, corresponding to an escalating level of potential terrorist threat.

Of course, nothing is ever mentioned about how much of this increased vigilance will apply to people coming from the States into Canada – only how it will work the other way around. Nor has our government done anything but meekly agree with all of these new conditions.

There’s something wrong when the cure is worse than the illness, and I don’t like the recent trend of America enforcing an ever increasing isolationist policy against any and every non-citizen. (Nor what they’re doing to their own citizens, albeit to a lesser degree.) Being careful and vigilant is one thing – being paranoid and overstepping the bounds of a basic right to privacy under the guise of “protection” is another. I would rather live in a world that was unable to prevent terrorist activity on an occasional basis, than I would in a police state in which terrorism was made impossible by virtue of denying everybody their right to freedom. If we lock everybody up then there won’t be any crime – but there won’t be much to enjoy either, nor will social productivity do anything other than decrease.

I wonder if the next time I try to cross the border into the States the customs agent will stop me, showing me a printout of this journal entry…