It's just that Canada is jealous...

Aside from working with birds nesting on private ranches, we are also doing surveys on the nearby military base. Before we could enter the premises, we needed to attend a briefing and go through some basic procedures training. The main gist of these meetings was to inform us that if we see something and we don’t know what it is – don’t touch it, it might explode, and to tell us that we are always to always check in whenever we drive anywhere so we don’t accidently blunder through a training exercise or a weapons test. It’s pretty basic stuff.

Upon arriving at the base initially, the man at the gate looked in and told us “Oh, I hear you have some foreigners on your crew. We cannot really permit them on the block. I’m sorry.” I looked at Cesar, my Chihuahuian counterpart and prepared to wait out the meetings with him outside the premises.

“You’re fine,” I was informed.

“Oh, no. I’m American. I’m a foreigner, too.”

“Yeah. That’s no problem.”

It seems it is only Cesar who was not allowed on the base, because there are just so dang many Mexican spies.

Later that day, he was informed he was also not allowed to drive the University of Alberta truck, due to insurance issues. This is strange to me, since he is in possession of a Canadian driver’s license and a perfectly clean driving record. After all of this scrutiny about his driver’s license, nobody even bothered to notice that my out of country license was expired. I don’t even understand how this works.

Now it comes out that the university has neglected to pay him correctly and has delayed his entry into the graduate program he is already accepted into for years due to a constantly lengthening list of completely spurious reasons. If this is how a university is behaving towards it’s immigrant population, one knows that other organizations are worse.

I guess I have come to expect this of the US, as much as I hate it, but I had been given the illusion that Canada was a more civilized country. I’m not even seeing a fraction of the bullshit, but I’m still feeling morally indignant. Frankly, the Mexicans are the best thing I’ve encountered about Canada.