Ottawa’s Nexus stubbornness makes no sense whatsoever
There are so many nice things we can’t have as Canadians. Halfway decent and affordable butter and cheese. An adult discussion about health-care reform. A Stanley Cup-winning hockey team. The Waffle House. Tolerable passenger rail service, if there’s any at all. Cellular telephone service at a halfway sane price. Ditto airline travel, which also comes with the world’s lamest “passenger bill of rights.” (If your airline physically beats the crap out of you, you might have a claim.)
One wonderful thing we can all have, assuming we have kept our noses relatively clean over the years, is a magic little piece of plastic called a Nexus card. For a few minutes of your time up front and just US$50 every five years, you can basically turn yourself into a VIP traveller. You get special, quicker treatment at 21 land border crossings between Canada and the United States — but it’s at the airport where it really shines.
You get to skip the regular security line, no matter where you’re travelling. And if you’re headed to the United States from a Canadian airport with preclearance facilities, you get to skip the regular customs line as well. It does everything except get you into the business class lounge and fix you a Caesar. Indeed, in normal times, it baffles me how few travellers take advantage of this program.
In today’s times, alas, Nexus is just another nice thing Canadians can’t have (unless they already have it, in which case they can renew it online) — and for that most Canadian of reasons, namely, “you’re not allowed to know, please stop asking.”
To get a Nexus card, you generally have to show up at an office to be interviewed and vouched safe by both an American and a Canadian border guard. In my experience, in Niagara Falls, Ont., the guards were in adjacent rooms. It was friendly and quick — much more so than your average border crossing, with or without Nexus.
All that ground to a halt during the pandemic, unsurprisingly, but enrolment centres reopened on the U.S. side of the border in the spring of this year. Canadian enrolment centres have not followed suit, for reasons not yet adequately explained.
At first, the issue seemed to be guns. In July, “two senior Canadian government sources” told The Canadian Press “the U.S. want(ed) its customs officers who work in Nexus centres to have the same protections guaranteed to its preclearance officers in Canada under a binational agreement, with sidearms as a major sticking point.”
That refers to a 2015 agreement between the two countries allowing American border officers to carry firearms at preclearance-enabled Canadian airports, and also providing for any criminal charges laid against onthe-job officers to be adjudicated at home, rather than where the alleged offence took place.
The guns explanation seemed plausible. Sidearms have been a domestic issue recently as well: Transport Canada and Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) fought for years over whether Canadian border guards stationed at airports should be allowed sidearms, in addition to those at land crossings. And Yanks with guns on Canadian soil is the sort of thing that still riles up Expo 67-era Canadian nationalists, who are inveterate voters.
More recently, however, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino kiboshed the guns narrative in The Globe and Mail. Rather, he said, the issue was extending American border guards’ protection from prosecution from airport preclearance facilities to other facilities.
None of these explanations make much sense. If we give U.S. border guards working in Canadian airports immunity from prosecution for whatever it is we think they might do, and allow them to carry guns, then who cares if we also do it for U.S. border guards working in Canadian Nexus offices? Both U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Canada Border Services Agency employees have a pretty solid record of not randomly opening fire on people (though 11 of the 18 shots fired by Canadian guards at land-border crossings between 2007 and 2017 were accidental discharges, which isn’t great).
Mendicino offered what sounded like an explanation to the Globe: “(At airports) travellers are moving immediately on to the United States as opposed to Nexus enrolment centres where they are away from official ports of entry.” But when you read it back, that’s just a correct observation. It doesn’t explain why the distinction in question should make any difference.
All this is especially frustrating because the way a Nexus card helps you navigate the Canada-u.s. border is exactly how almost everyone should be navigating the Canada-u.s. border. We roll our eyes at Brits who voted for Brexit and then bemoaned having to line up on arrival in Spain and Greece. But Canadians make that same basic error every day we don’t pursue a far more efficient experience at our only international land border, across which lies a very integrated economy.
Canada needs Nexus far more than the United States: 80 per cent of cardholders are Canadian. None of the Americans’ reported requests seem at all unreasonable. Prithee, Ottawa, can we please just have this one nice thing? Or else a coherent explanation why not?
OTTAWA, CAN WE PLEASE JUST HAVE THIS ONE NICE THING?