I traveled through Canadia with my son, as part of an Alaskan cruise, when he was 8ish. I had a signed letter, notarized, from his mom. I told him not to joke around with the authorities. He was questioned several times, separate from me.
After the final interview in Vancouver, he said to me (loudly enough for the nice lady to hear), “I didn’t tell her about the bad touches”.
Wait, I just assumed you’re driving. If you’re going to fly, everybody (age 0 to infinity) needs a passport (not a passport card or enhanced drivers license).
Surely there must be a statute of limitations on this. If you were convicted 20 years ago, for example, I can’t imagine that’s going to be a problem, but I don’t know for sure.
I had a conviction in 1987, and I have never had a problem entering the US. And I hope I never do.
AFAIK, the US doesn’t care. We care about serious crimes like petty shoplifting.
No, I have heard of one person who was turned back at the US boarder for a previous DWI.
Thanks, everyone. I like to get firsthand experiences from people who have actually done it.
(bolding mine)
Since nobody else is gonna ‘go there’…
South, if you’re coming from the North Pole. 
D&R
Or Alaska.
Or Detroit.
I thought all you needed to gain entry to Canada was a Tim card. Surely no Canadian would leave home without it.
When we went to Toronto last year, nothing like that was ever asked (though we flew in, rather than driving in).
We had passports (no kids in the party), that was all that was needed.
BTW, make sure you contact your credit card issuer before you go, and tell them that you’ll be using your card out of the country. Otherwise, the first time you go to charge something, there’s a high likelihood that it’ll raise a flag in their system as a stolen card.
It might have been a rule from the olden days before credit cards and ATMs when you would be expected to have the money you were going to use on vacation on you when you crossed the border in cash.
No, just the birth certificate or a passport, per the link above. Which makes sense: how many pre-driver’s-license age kids have a photo ID?
If you have the time and the money, even if a birth certificate will do I’d encourage you to get a passport for the kids anyway. It certainly doesn’t hurt and next time they might be looking to fly to Canada on short notice for some reason.
On the DUI thing, some may recall the minor question during the 2000 presidential campaign of whether George W. Bush would be able to go to Canada.
Maybe it’s different for different ages of kids, but last time we went in they wanted something like a school ID. Although maybe that was part of the whole mess of not having both birth parents at the border, so maybe that’s why they wanted it.
My links are politically biased!
I have heard lately of people being turned back by Canada for a DUI conviction. Note that in Canada this is a (federal) criminal code conviction, while in the USA it may simply be a state traffic act violation(?) and not show up on the crimnal conviction database. So odds are if your conviction is not in the crossborder system (CODIS?) the only way they would know is if you told them.
Yeah, I have heard of people getting denied entry to the USA from Canada for convictions from decades ago. One fellow was going to Disneyland with his family in his 30’s, when they turned him back at the border based on a drug possession when he was 15. (He said his mother called the cops when she found the drugs to “teach him a lesson”) A comment on the thread said that they will grant exceptions if the possion is less than 1 ounce of pot; but good luck finding any indication on a 20 year old arrest record what the actual weight of the find was. Often it would say “less than X ounces.”
I thnk they’ve gotten a lot more strict in the last few years.