Never having to say ‘Please’

A Canadian crossing the border into the US discovered to his dismay that you can’t expect polite discourse from border guards.

A British Columbian man has learned the hard way that you don’t ask a U.S. border guard to be polite when he asks you to turn off your vehicle’s engine.

Desiderio Fortunato, of Coquitlam, B.C., asked the guard to say please and instead received a face full of pepper spray.

“I just said please,” Mr. Fortunato explained Thursday. “He said ‘get out of the car or I spray you’ and … I thought he was just trying to scare me off or something and I was pepper sprayed from a foot or two away.”

He said it was then that five or six border guards jumped on him, placed him in handcuffs and questioned him for three hours last Monday afternoon.

“I felt like I was attacked by a bunch of wolves. They jumped on me, they threw me to the ground and they kneeled on me.”

Good thing that he didn’t tell the border guard to ‘take a hike’ or something less civilized or they might have shot him.

Seeing as the gentleman crosses the border on a regular basis you would think that by now he would have learned that customs officials, Canadian and US, have the power of God and in fact may even have God on their stop and search list.

But the question that comes to mind is: When a government agency issues uniforms to their personnel do they include a training course in thuggery at the same time? It sometimes appears to be the only explanation.

And to think it used to be called the “friendly” border.

Tags: Please Mr. Border Guard, US border guards, US/Canadian border civility, US/Canadian border protocol