A Den of VIPRs

At this point, it's unlikely that we'd be able to go back to the way things were twelve years ago; too many variables have changed, too many vested interests have entrenched themselves. It's difficult to project a near-term future where the security theatre that's become increasingly dominant in the West in general and the United States in particular will take a step back - instead, what's easiest to see is a future where that security theatre keeps moving forward, grimly and relentlessly, and in the name of security it may stamp freedom into the dust.

On the face of it, Canada and the United States responded to the September 11 attacks in similar ways; where the US set up the TSA under the Department of Homeland Security to take over airport security, which up until then had been overseen by one of the airlines using that airport, Canada established CATSA. The airport experience in both countries is broadly similar; airports on both sides of the border have pornoscanners, though you won't necessarily have to go through them, and while they didn't made me take my shoes off in the screening lines at Vancouver or Fredericton, that's been the case in Toronto and Los Angeles. The liquid restriction rule, intended to prevent binary explosives like in Die Hard With a Vengeance being brought on board, is universal, which for me just makes Amtrak that much more attractive for cross-border travel.

There is, however, one key difference; it's right in the names. CATSA is the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority; it's specifically responsible for security in airports, and nowhere else. The TSA is the Transportation Security Administration, and while many people consider it to be just the agency that deals with airport security, its actual bailiwick is "[to protect] the Nation's transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce."

That's right, the TSA's authority isn't just limited to airports, but extends to all transportation systems within the United States... which is rather a large point of responsibility, don't you think? It's also a rather unsettling one when you take into account issues of the sort that were raised in the Orange County Register's editorial of December 28th, which shines a light on the TSA's moves after ten years to expand their presence outside the airports. Right now there are twenty-five Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response, or VIPR, teams active in the United States.

What are they doing, you might ask? Well, according to NewsChannel5 of Nashville, back in October some of them were in Tennessee, establishing security checkpoints at two bus stations and five Interstate weigh stations in the state - giving Tennessee the somewhat dubious honor of becoming the "first state to fight terrorism statewide," as the headline rather bombastically puts it.

I'm sorry, sir or madam, but federal regulations dictate that no person may travel outside their homes with unscreened liquid in excess of 100 mL in a clear plastic bag. Please exit your car for secondary screening.

This is how it starts - not with a bang, but with a whimper. This is how control is extended. This is where police states begin. Sobriety checkpoints are one thing, but these are something else again; if anyone had suggested establishing security checkpoints on the highways to combat terrorism twenty years ago they would have been dismissed as a lunatic, and from 1992 to 2012 we get the entrenchment of lunacy as policy. How far can this go? Will security checkpoints along the highways, in metro stations and train stations, and on the streets be facts of life? Will there be something that, although it would never be called as such, acts like the internal passports of the Soviet Union - something to justify the warnings of "your papers, please?"

I'm thankful that, for now at least, Canada's version is specifically limited to airport security. There have also been pushbacks in the United States; in 2011, Amtrak ordered VIPR teams off its property for a time in response to some of these searches. Freedom of movement is an integral right in a free and open state, and while these random security checkpoints on previously open routes are justified by the spectre of terrorism, the real threat is what this sort of thing normalizes. Ten, twenty years from now - who knows?

Plus, that's if there isn't another major attack. If terrorists strike the United States again in a big way, all bets are off.

Dedicated to the Opportunities

You may have heard, a couple of months back, about how the Japanese government was going to give free airfare to ten thousand foreigners so that they could pump their money into the Japanese tourism sector, still reeling from the Tohoku earthquake in March. If you were looking forward to that, well, keep dreaming - the Japan Times reported yesterday that Japan's Finance Ministry has refused the Japan Tourism Agency's ¥1.18 billion request for 2012. Apparently - and I know this is hard to wrap one's head around, but work with me here - they "thought it would be difficult" to convince people that it was so important for their tax yen to go toward flying a bunch of gaijin over; besides, if newspaper travel sections are any indication, a lot of them may not have made it out of Tokyo anyway.

Though, when you think about it, that billion-plus yen might not necessarily go as far as you think - I wondered, would it even work? With today's exchange rates, that works out to just under $15.6 million Canadian, and while it's easy to think of that amount as pocket change in a government's context, the Japanese government already has all of its change spoken for and then some. Dividing the amout by ten thousand gaijin leaves ¥118,000 or $1,552 to cover fare to and from Japan for each one of them. Ideally, some would have come from inexpensive places; while an Air Canada round-trip flight from Vancouver to Narita in October 2012 is a little more than $1000 before fees and taxes, the same flight on Japan Airlines is a staggering $8,125.14. It seems, however, that it's considerably cheaper to fly JAL from the States.

It's a bit of a shame since I was hoping on being one of those ten thousand gaijin. In the end, though, this doesn't change anything; aside from a few Internet hopes and dreams being shattered, perhaps, everything is the same as it was yesterday. As far as my thoughts about this go, it comes down to the differences between the dedicated traveller and opportunistic tourist.

If JAL charges eight thousand dollars for an economy ticket to Vancouver, I shudder to think of how much one of those business-class seats in the front must cost. That's where you'd find a rich opportunistic tourist.

Before I start, let's break it down. A dedicated traveller would be someone who has it in their mind to go somewhere well in advance, who takes the time to learn the lay of the land and has a firm idea of why they're going over there in the first place. Opportunistic tourism would be, well, just like what the Simpsons did in the episode where they visit Japan - hanging out in the airport waiting for literal last-minute sales on unfilled seats. While that sort of tourism isn't really anything to sniff at within North America, it's a bit different when you cross the Pacific. For one, not everyone in Japan speaks English. The average opportunistic tourist from North America would not be particularly likely to speak Japanese - and that right there would seriously compromise how much an opportunistic tourist could really understand over there.

Yet, even if one was completely unable to communicate, understanding would still creep through. Hell, even that brief experience would be valuable if it shocked the complacent out of their comfort zones.

"I wish that a million of us would visit the USSR," wrote Robert Heinlein in 1960. "The dollars the Kremlin would reap would be more than offset by the profit to us in having so many free men see with their own eyes what Communism is." While there's thankfully no such adversarial spirit between North America and Japan today, the underlying theme remains true - there is always a profit to society when a critical mass of its members gain a true understanding of something else, a wider perspective. Nothing can be comprehended in isolation - whether it's your country, your language, or your society, you cannot truly understand it without something to compare it to. Despite a patina of superficial similarity, Japan and North America represent starkly different cultures, and understanding what they do and do not have in common will leave a person who is better equipped to understand and interact with the world as it is, and not just how they imagine it to be.

Photo: Cascading Along

The Amtrak Cascades is one of two trains that still runs into Vancouver's Pacific Central Station, the end of the transcontinental railway. It runs north-south from here to Eugene, Oregon via Portland and Seattle, tying Cascadia together. In order to get to Vancouver it needs to cross the Fraser River by way of the Westminster Bridge. I parked myself on the Pattullo Bridge yesterday to watch the Mt. Adams trainset pass by, the first northbound trip of the day. It's a fairly long train - considerably longer than any Via Rail trains I would see back in Toronto, and as time passes it will likely collect an ever-greater share of the traffic between Vancouver and Seattle.

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Freedom to Move

Every weekday morning around 9 Pacific Time, the day's transportation headlines from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Metro Library and Archive show up in my inbox. Over the past couple of months, ever since the midterm elections in the United States ended the Democratic Party's dominance in Congress, I've been seeing more and more stories about transit initiatives encountering heavier and heavier resistance in government committees that are now dominated, or led by, Republican Party lawmakers. Witness the case of planned intercity rail projects in Wisconsin and Ohio, where newly-elected Republican governors moved to cancel these programs.

Highways aren't getting the same rap - something that, to completely honest, comes as absolutely no surprise considering the strength of the Republicans' grip on the wheel. The open road has always carried connotations of freedom, the idea that people can just pack up their car and go where they want, when they want, how they want. While the truth is significantly more complicated, the simple meme of "roads mean freedom" is deeply entrenched in the United States' cognitive ecology.

The real barometer of freedom is choice. The infrastructural decisions of the past several decades, decisions which not only continue to echo but are echoed today, prioritized the development of highway networks over railway and urban transit expansion in both the United States and Canada. But we can't just blithely assume that what has held true for the past few decades will likewise continue uninterrupted into the future. We can't assume that people will always be able to pack up their car and go where they want, when they want, how they want. What if, for starters, they can't afford the gas?

A population's movements can be controlled by means far subtler than the internal passports demanded by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and which are still used in Russia today. We've already spent decades engineering our society around the idea of automotive mobility - it wouldn't take much now to use that dependence against us.

A China Eastern Airlines A340-600 taxis toward the runway at Vancouver International Airport

Imagine a future where the railways pull nothing but freight between cities... a future where oil shocks have come and gone, and the price of gas has reached such heights that the kind of intercity driving common today simply isn't economical anymore, or a future where the highways have been made limited-access only. It wouldn't be too hard to justify in the wake of, say, a national emergency. Sure, you could still go point-to-point by air; but air travel is the easiest method of transit for governments to control. I would not be surprised - but it would disturb me greatly - to live to see a future where air travel is far more regimented and controlled than it is now, where very few people fly anywhere other than government-approved sun destinations because the pre-ticketing background checks are just too much of a hassle. If you can't afford to drive, you can't get on a plane, and there aren't any trains you can take from one city to another - then how free are you, really?

There always need to be options in how people can get from point A to point B. In business, that competition is necessary to prevent consumer gouging. In government, it's just as necessary - to head off one potential mode of oppression and control.

A Capsule of a Concept

When I flew to Toronto this Christmas, I had to take a taxi from New Westminster to Vancouver International Airport because, for some reason, the SkyTrain doesn't start running until 7 AM on Sundays. I regretted that greatly when the fare came out to $45 even before the tip entered into it - but I paid it, because I didn't want to worry about missing my plane, and because Air Canada encouraged travellers to arrive early during the holidays because of volumes.

Of course, being that this was Christmas Day, most everyone was already where they were going and so passengers were rather thin on the ground in the terminal. Also, my flight was delayed five hours. But early flights are common, and with the recommended arrival times always something to contend with, getting to the airport in proper time can be problematic - if you don't have a car, at least, which I manifestly don't. It only gets worse when you're flying internationally, and you find that from the departure times you've got no choice but to call a cab.

I'm really into choice, myself. I started wondering if there was another way - if there's something that the airport of the future could do to simplify this problem. I think there is: capsule hotels.

A capsule hotel in Osaka, Japan. This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73 and is freely available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CapsuleHotel.jpg under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

Capsule hotels are just that - hotels where, instead of rooms, you get a small capsule big enough to fit yourself in with a pillow, bedding, a light, and so on. Their main advantage is that they're cheap; $24-48 CDN per night. They're easily stackable and don't take up too much space... and what do airports have, if not space?

I can imagine airports maintaining banks of capsules for brief overnight stays or travellers with long layovers. If it meant I could catch a 6 AM flight without having to stress out about how I was going to get to the airport, I would absolutely head on over at 11 PM the night before and rest my head for a few hours, comfortable in the knowledge that I wouldn't have very far to go at all to make my flight.

It's not for the claustrophobic, though.

Rollsigning Comprehension

Despite the stereotype of the man who refuses to stop and ask for directions, it's generally best to know how to get where you plan to go - in much the same way as it's generally best to consume food to fuel your metabolic functions. The stereotypical man's problem isn't that he doesn't know where he's going. For some reason, that awareness seems to fall off for some people when you remove them from the driver's seat.

I commute to downtown every afternoon on the streetcar, typically the 504 King as it is, generally speaking, far less erratic and unreliable than the 501 Queen. For the last two months, King streetcars have been running along Queen Street west of Shaw owing to water main reconstruction around King and Jameson. I don't find it too bad, since it increases the frequency of cars along that corridor. Still, whenever the streetcar approaches Shaw and the operator announces that this is a King streetcar and will be turning south on Shaw and east on King, there are almost always people who are shocked or surprised and have to alight and wait for the next car to Neville Park.

Sure - maybe these are people who use the streetcar only infrequently, if at all. Maybe it's their first time waiting at the stop and climbing those stairs. Maybe they don't know about the diversion, and just assume that since the streetcar is currently on Queen, it will remain along Queen.

That's all well and good, except that in 99% of cases, the streetcar's rollsigns accurately explain where it's going - and riders have to walk right under one to board. The other 1% occurs when the operator doesn't switch the rollsign when they reach one end of the route, but in my experience that's an unusual circumstance.

Three guesses as to where this streetcar is going.

I suppose I just have difficulty understanding where these people are coming from. The way I see it, it behooves travellers to have at least a basic understanding of their surroundings and their route - it's one way to mitigate the "absolute dependency" issue some people seem to have with public transit, in that once you pay your fare you're on the rails.

Note that I'm not talking about people who know where they're going, but have to ask the operator if this particular streetcar will get them there; that's just good sense. I've had to do the same thing myself - last June in Vancouver, after conquering the Lions Gate Bridge on foot, I staggered onto the first bus I found and asked if it went to Lonsdale Quay. I think most of the North Shore buses do go there, but I hadn't studied that part of the network - and unlike Toronto streetcars and buses, TransLink buses only indicate what route they're running, not where they're heading.

Realistically, though, at its core I think this is just a symptom of a similar problem: many people just don't read, unless it's something they believe has direct applicability to them; at least that's how I envision it, because there's got to be some kind of reason. You'll encounter it time and again if you follow sites like Not Always Right. It's just... it doesn't take all that much effort to know that "501" means Queen Street and "504" means King Street. I mean, if you were trying to get up north to a buddy's cottage, would you just go along the first highway you found because a highway is a highway?

Awareness is a necessity. Without it, you might end up lost somewhere you've never seen before, with no idea how to get back to the familiar.

Tourist, Educate Thyself

The other day I was riding the SkyTrain - yes, I know, completely out of character, but bear with me - and, while the train was waiting with its doors open at Commercial-Broadway Station, I overheard a tourist asked someone near the doors if this was the train to the airport. I assume that he was a tourist because 1) he had an Australian accent, and 2) he was looking for directions to the airport. As it was, the person he asked just said no; had it been me, I would've given directions.

For those of you playing along at home, the simplest way to get from Commercial-Broadway Station to Vancouver International Airport by SkyTrain is to ride an Expo Line or Millennium Line train to Waterfront Station and transfer there to the Canada Line. Riding to Granville Station and transferring to Vancouver City Centre Station is also acceptable, but not quite as direct.

This train is, in fact, for YVR-Airport.

Nevertheless, you'd think that if you're a tourist in a strange city, you'd make an effort to at least know how to access the airport via public transit, as it's a rather important destination. It's not as if the SkyTrain is complicated, either - the bus system is one of the most chaotic and difficult-to-understand I've ever used, but the SkyTrain is straightforward and simple. In my book, familiarizing yourself with the basic methods of getting around a city you know you're going to visit is just good sense; just like if you're travelling to a place that speaks another language, you should at least know how to say please and thank you and how to order beer.

Because, really, I've always believed that the point of going to new places is to come to a greater understanding of both the new and the old - in addition to what you discover about the place you've journeyed to, that knowledge can be placed in context with what you didn't know before. Without that proper context, knowledge is inert - travel and trade and interchange with new perspectives is what's required for dynamism and growth. Compare the trajectory of the independent and perpetually squabbling Greek city-states, for example, with that of China under, say, the Qin Dynasty.

A lot of this, I know, comes from my own biases shining through. When I landed here, aside from how to reach the airport and hotel I didn't know very much - but after a couple days of just wandering around downtown and more outlying areas, I built a map for myself. I'm well aware that my adherence to the wandering ethos is not universal. Even then, though, there's nothing stopping a misdirected tourist from writing "take Canada Line to airport" on a piece of pocket paper - then the question becomes, much more directly, "where can I transfer to the Canada Line?"

Like I said, though, it's easiest at Waterfront. There, at least, you don't have to go outside.

To Ride the Friendly Rails

The next time I visit the United States, I think I'll be taking the train.

After the recent attempted terrorist attack on a Northwest Airlines aircraft descending into Detroit, foiled primarily due to the incompetence of the erstwhile terrorist in question, the United States' Transportation Security Administration seems to have wasted no time in rolling out New Security Measures for all aircraft entering the US - I say "seems to" because as I write this, I can't actually find any details about it on the TSA's own website.

The New York Times report suggests that one of the new measures is that passengers will have to remain seated during the last hour of the flight, during which time they will also be prohibited from accessing their carry-on luggage - pretty much entirely because our would-be bomber accessed his carry-on luggage to assemble his pyrotechnic during the last hour of the flight. Whether or not this will prove to be a knee-jerk response, like the brief prohibition of all carry-on luggage in the immediate aftermath of the planned 2006 transatlantic aircraft bombings, or if it will join the removal and X-raying of shoes in the pantheon of American air travel security, remains to be seen.

Whenever one of these incidents takes place, though, I'm reminded of one truth - that This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things. Airport security today is a silent war between screeners and terrorists, and security is a reactionary force. The mechanism is set up to prevent things that worked once from happening twice - for the terrorists, things only need to work once, and I don't think they're going to stop probing for the cracks in security any time soon.

If this goes on, I don't think the air travel industry as it currently exists will be tenable. Rising fuel prices have already wounded the airlines, and if security measures become steadily more onerous, there's going to come a time where people are no longer willing to put up with it all. Fortunately, the plane is not the only way to travel.

There's a joke that's made the rounds before and which, I think, has some truth to it - "How do you become a millionaire? Be a billionaire and start an airline." As I understand it, the modern dominance of air travel, particularly within North America, owes a lot to governmental subsidies that allowed the early airlines to undercut existing rail networks. While governments have a deserved reputation for making stupid decisions, even the most knotheaded won't throw good money after bad forever. If the mid-20th century was the Jet Age, I have a feeling that the early 21st century may turn out to be the Second Age of Rail.

Aircraft are fragile things - 36,000 feet above the ground with temperatures outside often Antarctic, small noises echo loudly - whereas trains, by their very nature, are less vulnerable to the midair sort of terrorism. Safety, not death, is on the other side of the window. One bomb could destroy an aircraft, but one bomb would not reduce an entire train to wreckage.

Today, air travel has the advantage of speed. In the years to come, though, it won't have a monopoly. The United States is currently looking into high-speed rail in a big way, and even if trains never are as fast as aircraft, that doesn't mean they're unsuitable for long-distance travel. After all, our ancestors managed it - and we have a wireless communications infrastructure that they didn't. Perhaps in the future, an ordinary trip from Toronto to Los Angeles won't leave from Pearson International Airport but from Union Station, and travellers will have their own allowances to work remotely and conduct their business in transit. For plenty of people, it'd probably be preferable to taking extra time off from work just to get there and back.

I recognize that as a Canadian citizen I do not have a right to visit the United States, merely the privilege. All I want is to be able to exercise that privilege in the least onerous manner possible.

Tyrannies of Distance

There's an old anecdote that in the United States a hundred years is a long time, and in the United Kingdom a hundred miles is a long way. It seems to me that North American society has forgotten the truth of it. A lot of bad habits can become so ingrained to seem unimpeachable in far less than a hundred years, and the road and highway networks of Canada and the United States make distances seem artificially compressed.

I realized this in my bones yesterday, during the tail end of my crazy bicycle adventure. I'd taken the GO train to Oshawa GO Station, and intended to cycle back to my home near Exhibition GO Station - a distance of 53.7 kilometers by the rails. Nothing, right? I'd done forty-two kilometers before, and the only killer chunk of that was a long, steep hill on Wilson Avenue in Downsview.

It wasn't until I crossed from Pickering to Scarborough, found myself forced to switch from comfortable lakeside bicycle trails to Lawrence Avenue East - which, though an official bike route, doesn't have anything to actually make it so - that I found I was still only halfway home. Scarborough, if you're unaware, is big. Much of it was rural up until the postwar housing boom, and Scarborough is where you will find the sort of suburban developments that could just as easily be in Scottsdale.

Even before then, my ride through Pickering wasn't stress-free either, once the trail so thoughtfully dumped me onto Liverpool Street and then Bayly Street, which parallels Highway 401 and struck me as its younger sibling - wide lanes, wide grassy shoulders, few opportunities to enter or exit, and aside from a single sidewalk on the south side of the lanes, no consideration given to road users not driving cars.

The extent to which this philosophy of rambling suburbs connected by wide, howling highways and mini-expressways dominates North American development makes it even more disturbing to realize that it's only in the last sixty years that it became the law of the land. What's worse, in my opinion, is that it's actually harder to destroy than to create in this context. We would have a far more difficult time adapting our existing infrastructure to new modes of living than our predecessors had building that infrastructure in the first place.

The phrase "tyranny of distance" originates from the sprawling decentralization of Australian civilization, with metropolitan centers in the southeast, northeast, and west cut off from each other by thousands of kilometers of hostile terrain. Canada, by contrast, is centralized in its own peripheries, with the vast majority of the population brushing up against the American border because that's where the best lands that we have can be found - until, of course, they're plowed under for more developments that prize wide lanes and sparse settlement.

We think that the world is smaller than it is because of how easy we can get from place to place, either physically or by online proxy. That's nothing but an illusion. Driving for pleasure from Oshawa to Toronto might mean a relaxing bop around back roads, not to mention even more kilograms of carbon dioxide chilling in the atmosphere, but what have you accomplished? Nothing, except reinforcement of the perspective you already had - that if traffic's good, Toronto's half an hour or forty-five minutes away.

In the end, I didn't even make it that far. After five hours on the saddle I'd gone way beyond the limits of my endurance, and I diverted to Guildwood GO Station and took the train the rest of the way home.

If we want to learn the lessons that will be necessary to solve our pressing problems, if we want to exit the twenty-first century in a better state than when we entered into it, we can't keep falling back on old perspectives. There are some things that can only be meaningfully experienced with no filters. Taking a hundred miles, or even ten, on a bicycle demonstrates just how long those distances can be when they're paid for not with gasoline, but with dripping sweat and aching muscles.

They say that cars bring freedom. Personally, I prefer the freedom of the grocery store being close enough for me to walk.

Who Stands Up For Canadians?

Recent days have seen the long-overdue return of Suaad Hagi Mohamud to Canada after spending nearly three months trapped in Kenya. She was taken into custody at Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in mid-May because, apparently, her lips didn't match her four-year-old passport photo. When faced with a Canadian held in custody for such a reason, how did the Canadian consulate react? Obviously, it accused her of being an impostor and ever-so-helpfully voided her passport so that the Kenyan government could prosecute her for, among other things, being in the country illegally.

A simple DNA test could have - and, eventually, did - solve this problem. Nevertheless, there wasn't even the beginning of action on this front until the end of July, more than two months after Mohamud's initial detainment. It's not as if it's an expensive option, as the Toronto Star reported that the government would bear the $810 cost. For a government, that's less than loose change in the couch.

There's an old truism that actions speak louder than words, and through their conduct of this case the ruling Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been hollering to wake up the dead. Hollering about what they think of citizenship, and the way in which they view the people to whom they're accountable. I used to think that it was a government's responsibility and duty to support its citizens when they're in scrapes overseas, that that was part of what citizenship meant. A government has an obligation to protect the people who live under its jurisdiction, because otherwise, what's the point of a government at all?

A government that can't do this is sad, a tragedy. A government that won't do this is something else again. I can buy a brief delay because, really, things only slowly move through bureaucracies, and there are few denser bureaucracies than in the parliaments and congresses of the world. But _two months?_

What really got my goat about all this was that while going to work the day news broke that Ms. Mohamud was coming home, I passed an outdoor television that flashed a headline along the lines of "Conservatives maintain slight lead in poll." I can only hope that this was referring to the latest EKOS Research Associates poll, conducted on July 21st, which put the Conservatives at 32.8% to the Liberals' 32.5%, because otherwise, we have a government whose supporters don't care that it left a Canadian citizen to languish in limbo for two months. In its actions, Canada's government has demonstrated a contempt for citizenship, and the fact that no heads have yet rolled speaks volumes.

I recently got my passport renewed, and I flew with it to Montreal and back with no problems at all. Nevertheless, the picture on it was taken in May. For the purposes of comparison, here's a photo of me taken on July 28, 2007, and my previous (heavily redacted for posting) passport, which was still valid at that time. I'm even wearing the same shirt in both photos. Nevertheless, if I had a passport photo like this now, I would not feel comfortable travelling on it given Ms. Mohamud's experience.

So what's the deal? Should we have to renew our passport photos every year so that we can't be as easily arrested for our lips looking wrong, or having different glasses, or losing or gaining enough weight to change the shape of our face? Or should we look to the government that has, by its actions, devalued a document that is meant to "allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary" - a direct quote from the first page of my passport.

There's no such thing as tiered citizenship in Canada. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is very clear about this - every individual is equal before and under the law.