According to the Toronto Star, while countless visitors and returning Canadians are met with courteous, professional service at land crossings and airports, others complain of autocratic behaviour and humiliating treatment by CBSA officers. The complaints, obtained through an Access to Information request, include accounts of officers cursing and yelling at Canadians and visitors, and threatening them with sniffer dogs or arrest for seemingly minor infractions. There were 1,421 complaints filed with the CBSA in 2008-09, down slightly from 1,607 the previous year.

“We felt harassed and belittled by what happened,” wrote one American woman, who said her initial crime was to eat pretzels while a border official was talking to her husband on a Toronto-bound Amtrak train in Niagara Falls on June 7, 2007. She said the officer told her to, “Stop eating those pretzels. That’s very rude when we come on board.” The writer said that’s when the trouble began. The agent accused the elderly couple and their 50-year-old friend of several things, including being on drugs or drunk. That was too much for America trio; they caught the next train back to Rome, NY, forgoing the trip to Toronto they had planned for a year.

In another case, not having a job landed a Canadian man in hot water. “He was as asked if he was unemployed and why he was not looking for a job and what was the problem why he hadn’t found a job … I don’t think being unemployed is a crime … but he (the officer) made us feel it was,” said his partner in her complaint letter of September 2005, after crossing back into Canada at Sarnia.

When a vacation-bound American family showed up at the Pigeon River crossing southwest of Thunder Bay in August 2008 without all the necessary identification, the Canadian border officer lashed out, according to the complaint: “I guess you didn’t realize you were coming to (a) whole other country … I guess you just didn’t give a s—t, did you?” The complainant was backed up by a senior CBSA official who said the officer “admitted that his comments and behaviour on that day were uncalled for.”

The full article appears here.