Expiration of identity documents
Once upon a time, early last week, I made yet another trip to Buffalo NY to buy groceries. It needed to be done because our Permanent Resident cards were five years old and about to expire at the end of October. Immigration Canada is understaffed these days, due to the Recession, so it will take several months to get replacement cards. The only official purpose for those cards is for gaining re-entry to Canada at the border; now that they’ve expired, we will not be leaving the country anytime soon.
Last July, the children’s passports became five years old and they expired. Replacing a child’s passport cannot be done by mail and requires a trip to the US consulate in Toronto. We finally got around to doing that at the end of September. Actually, the trip wasn't as bad as feared: parking was a pain, the TSA goons at the door were rude, but the inside consulate staff were nice enough. Kid #1 is now a grown-up and her new passport is good for ten years, while Kid #2 got another five-year kiddie passport.
During the months between the expiration and the replacement of the children’s passports, Wifey was worried: what would we do if there were a Death In The Family and we had a sudden emergency need to visit the States? It is against the law for an American citizen to enter that country without showing a US passport if they have one, but what happens if the passport is expired? I didn’t think it would be such a big deal; surely there would be procedures in place. We would probably be diverted to the Border Patrol office, have to show alternative ID, get grilled by Blueshirts, then they would let us proceed to the funeral. Anyway, this didn’t happen.
So we’re on our way to Buffalo, just about to pass the “Last exit in Canada” sign, when Wifey checks the passports to make sure everything is fine… but everything is not fine. The children are fine, but the parents’ passports expired last July when they became ten years old. Oopsie! So now we have to decide whether to turn around and drive an hour back to our house, or brave the border with bad passports. I made an executive decision to keep going.
At the border, the guard did a double-take when processing the third passport. I imagine a bright red flashing EXPIRED! indicator on his computer console, but he said nothing. He asked some unusual questions (e.g., “Have you renounced your US citizenship?”) but nothing specifically about the expired passports. Eventually he waived us through, without even diverting us to the Big House.
The grocery shopping was uneventful. We went to the Tops and Wegmans supermarkets as usual. We spent $800 on this trip, which was the most ever, including over $200 just for canned tuna. Inflation is bad these days, despite the official lies from the government.
Upon our return to Canada, the border guard was gruff with us. When we told her we bought $800 worth of food, she asked for the receipts and studied them carefully. I imagine that she was upset to see $75 worth of boneless skinless chicken breasts (which cost twice as much in Canada because they don’t use undocumented Hispanic serfs in their chicken processing plants). But perhaps she was less displeased to see that the single largest line-item was the tunafish, which is not caught in Canada so there were no local fishermen that we were refusing to support. She asked various questions of the form, “Are you going to eat all this food yourselves?” While there is apparently no sales tax exemption for one-day excursions, no border guard has ever demanded that we pay that tax. On this day as well we were eventually waived through with no penalty.
Yet another successful shopping trip!