Ages ago a friend of mine was invited to Canadia to receive an award (music related).
He arrived in Canada, but customs/immigration denied him entry due to an old DUI. It was a screw-up that allowed him to get as far as he did. He made some calls and the organization presenting his award (govt related) said they’d iron things out.
My friend got frustrated after a couple of hours at the airport and returned home. The organization was horribly embarrassed. My friend hasn’t had a good thing to say about Canada since then.
Whenever I plan to travel to a foreign country, the first thing I check is entry requirements. If someone doesn’t do that basic due diligence, that’s on them.
My friend wasn’t planning on traveling to Canada…he was invited there by an organization that was part of the government. They paid for his ticket. I give him some leeway there.
I do the same, but I don’t go beyond “Do I need to apply for a visa in advance, or an ESTA-style preregistration, or do I just show up with my passport at the immigration desks”. Being banned from a country for a decades-old criminal conviction in something which is considered a minor thing in your country appears a bit far-fetched, so I can see why someone would not have looked into it in advance. Then again, I don’t have any past conviction in anything. Maybe I’ve said something in social media posts in the past which, depending on the political regime of the country I’m going to, might be frowned upon, but so far I haven’t had any problems in this regard either.
@Spoons has already provided good answers to your various questions and comments. To add to that, you can browse through the various penalties for DUI in Ontario here:
To summarize, a BAC of between 0.05 and less than 0.08 is considered a “warn” level, and penalties are much less severe than 0.08 or over, which takes you into criminal territory. Both have rapidly escalating consequences for repeat offenders. Another potential consequence not yet mentioned may be a license conditional on driving only vehicles equipped with a breathalyzer-actived ignition interlock, typically for repeat offenders.
As has already been said, the relative severity of these penalties reflects the view in Canada that impaired driving is a serious threat to public safety. If you look at sentencing guidelines in Canada for criminal offenses across the board, they actually tend in general to be much less severe than in the US, largely because the emphasis tends to be on rehabilitation rather than punishment per se. But drunk driving and firearms violations are two areas that are taken much more seriously in Canada.
FWIW, I believe rules have been modified so new drivers are not permitted any alcohol. The rate is 0.08% which for adult males may or may not be one drink an hour (12 oz beer = 5 oz wine = 1.5 oz spirits = one drink). People metabolize alcohol at different rates, some lack the dehydrogenase enzyme, numbers depend on blood volume which varies by body weight.
This is not true. A friend of mine used to run a trucking service that would take over loads from drivers that had DUIs and could not get into Canada. He had deals with several major trucking companies. So a company in Texas could send a driver with a DUI to the US side of the border, where my friends drivers, all DUI free, would deliver the load into Canada, pick up the return load and drive it back across the border and hand it off to the original driver. This was in the 1980s.
I think that would be a pretty common question at most borders. In the old days, it was pretty easy to get into Canada with a hunting rifle or shotgun. IIRC all you needed was some easy proof, like a registration at a hunting lodge. I don’t know what it’s like now but I’m pretty sure they will not let you bring in a AR15 for hunting purposes.
I don’t think they are any more adept than any other border guards. they have simple questions that trip some people up. They back that with instantaneous background check. And, of course, the most useful thing they have going for them, many people are stupid and many more are terrible liars.
I was also pointing out myself for not knowing.
Stating facts that are not facts is not what your are calling “asking questions”.
Your response to me seems to be like you have been given power to bully people.
You seem much more hostile then me.
Since you are relatively new here, you may not have picked up on the fact that General Questions is a very fact-oriented forum. The general rule everywhere here except the BBQ Pit is “attack the post, not the poster”. This is enforced even more strictly in GQ than other forums.
In other words, don’t say that people have “NO CLUE” as that is attacking the poster. Instead just say that they are mistaken in this case and post what you believe to be the correct information.
You are permitted to disagree with moderation, but we ask that you do so in the About This Message Board forum and not in the threads themselves as you did here. You’re new, so no biggie. If you wish to discuss this further, please feel free to start a thread about the issue in About This Message Board and link back to this thread for reference.
This is just wrong. I still remember a border guard to whom I showed a photocopy of a page copied from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that that might be their opinion but the border guards work by their own rules. I wrote to Foreign Affairs to tell them the border patrol operates by their own rules and never got an answer.
It is a good idea to get your facts straight before posting, like you said above.
Canadian Border Serrvices is a branch of the Ministry of Public Safety. They are not under the direction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and are not bound by Foreign Affairs’ interpretation of the law. They are required to follow the law as interpreted by the DOJ lawyers assigned to Canadian Border Services. If there is a disagreement as to the interpretation of the law, that has to be thrashed out within the DOJ. It doesn’t mean the Canadian Border Services doesn’t follow the law.
The Canadian border guards can check your criminal history, but the system isn’t completely infallible.
Decades ago, I was arrested for theft. I didn’t do it, and the charges were dismissed. I honestly hadn’t thought about it ever since. It never affected me in any way… until I moved to Canada.
I’d gotten a job offer in Edmonton and so we sold our house in preparation for the move, and as a result most of our belongings were somewhere on the road between Salt Lake City and Edmonton. We stayed the night in Grand Rapids, then drove the final exciting two hours to the border to officially cross. When we got there, though, the guard processing me said they wouldn’t accept me, because according to their records I’d been arrested for a felony… and then it was never resolved. He couldn’t answer why it had never been resolved over the past 25 years- he could just see that it had happened. I suppose I looked like some sort of D.B. Cooper-ish criminal mastermind who’d been on the run from the law for a quarter of a century.
We drove back to Grand Rapids, and had no idea what was going to happen. We’d both quit our jobs, sold our house, and we had our two dogs and only had a few changes of clothing. Oh, and almost no money, since we’d had to pay off my truck to import it into Canada. We were effectively homeless. We spent almost a week in Grand Rapids, which isn’t nearly as much fun as it sounds.
We managed to remotely hire a lawyer back in Texas to look into it- apparently, the resolution to the arrest was never actually filed. Somehow it had been hanging over my head for decades, but it had never come up, despite all of our interactions with the government since then. The lawyer managed to get a signed affidavit stating that it had been dismissed, and we went back to the border to try again. We got the same border guard, which was lucky since he was already familiar with our case. Less than an hour later, we were allowed to cross.
My cousin is truck driver. He takes many loads to/from Winnipeg, just for this reason. It’s been this way for many years, though I imagine it’s got harder in the recent past.
Ouch. I had to laugh, though — on an episode of the 70s kids educational TV show “The Electric Company,” there’s a scene where the “grand prize” for some contest (emceed by Rita Moreno) is…a week in Grand Rapids, Michigan!
