What
sakico describes is not an
urban legend; it happens all too often. Americans don't believe that their
national sovereignty ends at the border.
But this is not limited to individual Americans. Extraterritoriality, that is, the United States extending its laws beyond its borders, is not new.
many Canadian companies have been caught under the Helms-Burton Act for trading with Cuba, and the Trading with the Enemy Act before that. Cuba is not an enemy of Canada.
The United States pushed the website iCrave TV off the air, not because it is illegal to rebroadcast television in Canada, but because it is illegal in the United States.
And then there is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the DMCA, which extends American Copyright law throughtout the world wide web and throughtout the world.
What Americans would criticize as intolerable infringments on their free speech, and other rights, they routinely do to eveyone else--especially Canadians.
And why not, on this Canada Day, happy Canada day, many prominent Canadians are seriously suggesting that we should take on the American dollar as our own--we're already subject to the regulation of the Fed anyhow--abolish the CBC--we watch mostly american TV now, anyhow--and get rid of the border, it would make an unbeatable market!!!
When Stockwell Day and the Canadian Alliance Party become the government, and take the policies of Ontario's Mike Harris to the federal government---we will have become Americans.
The don't need to come up here and shoot us all--we've already given up. Or soon will. And for some of us, it will have been a enthousiastic surrender.
Though I will not be one of those.