A buddy of mine from grad school back at McGill University (located in Canada, by the way, which is crucial to the story) is expecting a baby. He and his wife are in their forties, so they are doing a panel of genetic tests in the early stage of pregnancy for obvious reasons.
Of course, they are doing the tests at a private clinic and paying a huge sum of money for them because the tests are time-sensitive, again, for obvious reasons.
After they had the tests done, they were told they’d have to wait for several weeks for the results. For obvious reasons, one prefers to get the results of these tests as early as possible.
But the clinic explains that the tests can only be conducted in. . . California. So the blood and saliva sample my buddy and his wife submitted are being shipped all the way from Montreal to California and back. This means that the samples will be stuck at the customs, for obvious reasons.
What is not immediately obvious is why California is the closest place where tests can be conducted.
Clarissa's Blog 
California has a lot of biotech start up companies. If they’re doing some sort of non-standard testing, then maybe the CA companies are the only ones available or are the most accurate? But maybe I being naive and hoping these sorts of things happen for logical reasons… Fingers crossed for your friends that they get their results back in a timely manner with nothing but good news.
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It’s just that people are understandably nervous and want the results sooner rather than later.
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There’s a big research hospital about ten to twenty hours away from Montreal (I’ve never made the trip myself, so I’m not sure). That’s in the US, but it’s closer than CA. I find it extremely difficult to believe that California is the closest place for them to get tests done. It’s probably something stupid like whoever they send it to in CA is providing some sort of special funding for the clinic. It’s even possible that they were once located somewhere in Canada and then moved to California.
It reminds me of my friend’s cousin who lives in Canada. When the cousin was pregnant they had to stage emergencies just to get an ultrasound. The waiting list for such a typical procedure was eight months.
On the other hand, research materials and biological samples are usually sent through different channels than other things. That makes it less likely to get stopped by customs, since they’re likely specially labeled. And if this clinic and others regularly send materials to be tested to wherever they’re sending them, they’re more likely to be on a list of acceptable destinations, which means that even if they’re stopped at customs they’re less likely to remain there for long.
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