The Amy Goodman Incident

Amy Goodman…never heard of her. Apparently she’s an “influential US journalist and host of the Democracy Now radio show”, according to a story from thestar.com.

She’s been in the news as of late though. Here’s the Coles-Notes version:

Amy was scheduled to speak in Vancouver in part to help plug her new book, and particularly about Tommy Douglas and health care. When she got to the border though she was faced with Canadian Border Services agents who were quite interested in what she would be talking about. They asked her whether she would be talking about the Olympics. Amy states:

"I thought the guard meant (U.S. President Barack) Obama going to Copenhagen to talk about the Games in Chicago. I was embarrassed because I didn't realize he meant the Games in Vancouver."

She was detained at the border for 90 minutes, was asked to produce notes on her speech and had her computers searched. She was only given temporary access to Canada: 48 hours.

Apparently this has thrown “Americans in a tizzy” according to the Globe and Mail. Keith Oberman of MSNBC commented about the incident on his daily Countdown show and Lucy Dalglish of Washington based “Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press” was stunned. She was quoted by the Globe and Mail as saying about journalists being harassed:

“You hear about American border officials doing things like this all the time, but not Canada.It's absolutely ridiculous.”

The Canadian Border Services Agency is taking the expected stance of not commenting on specific cases.

Personally, I’m torn on this story.

The irony of this of course is that the American media hasn’t run any stories about the numerous Canadians who faced similar or worse experiences crossing into the US. And I do have to question the quality of a journalist that doesn’t understand major world events happening on their own continent (really Amy, you had *no* idea the Winter Olympics were in Vancouver this winter? Really?!).

Was the Canadian Border Services agents out of line to question her? Not at all. Were they out of line to give her only a 48 hour pass into Canada? Not at all. Americans need to realize that there’s a hardening of the border on both sides. We share a continent, but we are separate countries and while we may long for the pre-9/11 days where our border was more a legality than anything, those days my friends are gone.

The cries of outrage coming from the American media are misplaced. Amy wasn’t coming up to Canada in a journalist role; she was coming to speak but also to plug her new book…this was a marketing event, not someone covering a news story.

With all that said though, the words of Ghandi echo here:

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

While we need to be diligent in ensuring criminals and those that would do harm to our country are kept out, we must ensure that Canada is still a country that values free speech and the opinions and thoughts of others…even if those “others” are from a different country.

There needs to be more transparency within the CBSA. What was the reasoning for only granting a 48 hour pass to someone who (I’m assuming) has no criminal record or any other reason to be outright denied entry into the country? Not commenting on specific cases is a cop-out and there needs to be checks and balances in place so that the public can evaluate the abilities of our border agents.

So while I understand that maybe the border guards were a bit zealous in their questioning and that we’ll never really know why they were so focussed on the 2010 Olympics questions, there’s another part of me that’s irritated as the American response of outrage. She wasn’t banned from Canada, she wasn’t kept from seeing her sick child being cared for in a different country…she was simply questioned and given a short term pass into a foreign country where she delivered her speech as planned. Sorry, but that’s hardly worth all the press that this story has garnered.