Talking about Dragged-Out Border Hassles with Brian Higgins Finally!!! by John Hardy SnowbirdProfile For Canadian snowbirds, it’s a long-awaited Welcome Back. Liberation. Freedom. For Brian Higgins, the New York congressman and vocal advocate and his relentless 19-month push for the U.S. government to reopen the Canada-U.S. border, it is a colossal relief and a return to common sense. After all, border-hopping (for Canadians and Americans) is a taken-for-granted tradition. Almost a heritage. Whether it’s Canadian snowbirds driving to Florida, Texas or Arizona, Americans with family or cottages in Canada, or the popular trend of border-hopping shoppers in either direction. For most snowbirds and those fortunate to live within reasonable driving distance of those familiar Stop-on-Red-Light kiosks staffed with uniformed, bulletproof-vested question-askers, crossing the border is no big deal. It’s fact and it’s even quirky trivia. The 5,525-mile border between Canada and the U.S. is renowned as the world’s longest, unprotected boundary. A usually positive and bilateral bragging right with more than 400,000 people, 120 border crossings and more than $1.6 billion in goods crossing daily. When things are normal and good, crossing the border is fairly routine and uneventful. Unfortunately, the past 19 months have been anything but normal, good, routine or uneventful. For Canadian snowbirds and other border-hoppers, the world’s longest border became a frustrating and annoying controversy. InMarch 2020, in a sudden “you-don’t-knowwhat-you-have-until-it’s-gone” turn of events, the world’s longest, unprotected boundary was shut down and closed to non-essential travel. The busiest border crossings immediately felt the crunch. Especially heavily travelled ones such as Ontario’s BuffaloNiagara Falls, the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, the Thousand Islands Bridge, Quebec’s Champlain-Rouses Point, the busy Sweetgrass–Coutts Border from Alberta into Montana, the Peace Arch and the Pacific Highway between Vancouver and Seattle. For reasons that have still never been explained, the U.S. allowed Canadian leisure travellers to fly into the country. Before the shutdown, American politicians including Florida’s Marco Rubio and Rick Scott and New York’s Elise Stefanik chiselled out an exciting, Canadian-boosting border plan to allow snowbirds a 30% longer stay in the U.S. When the border shut down, those Canadian snowbird-friendly grand plans were put on hold. For 19 months, together with a chorus of local politicians such as the mayors of Niagara Falls, Windsor, Vancouver, Buffalo and Detroit, Congressman Brian Higgins protested, pushed and nudged every chance he got. He lobbied Ottawa, Canada’s Public Safety Minister, U.S. Homeland Security and all the way to theWhite House. He launched a crusade, urging officials to “listen to the science” and reopen the world’s longest and a vital border. When Canada was still humming, hawing and hesitating before reopening the land borders for Americans, Higgins was staunchly outspoken, fed up and angry about Canada’s red-tape delays. “The Canadian government foot-dragging was bulls***!” he vented. “There were no other words for it, other than disrespect toward the people of the United States and Canada. Nobody suggested that it be done arbitrarily, even though Canada did make an exception for hockey players last year. All we asked for was a safe opening by simply following the science. “For areas like Western New York, a trip across the border has always felt like a trip across the street. And after more than a year divided,” he emphasized, “we badly needed a plan to reconnect with our Canadian neighbours. The pandemic created challenges but working together, we needed policies that protected and benefited communities on both sides of the border.” 12 | www.snowbirds.org
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