Somebody please convince me not to drag a suitcase of books and paintings to Canada for a weeklong Thanksgiving stay where I will have zero time to read or paint.
We will have four Ukrainian and Peruvian grandmas, three parents, and three kids celebrating American Thanksgiving under one roof in Canada.
The suitcase full of books sounds excellent—if you need to, maybe aim for five total. Maybe just narrow it down to one painting. That way even it’s more of a “just in case I have time” thing rather than an expectation that you’ll have time.
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I know some people… If you pay them well enough, they will make that suitcase disappear. 🙂
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Do you want to hang out, though? I’m there all next week and will be desperate for some sanity.
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Can you bring some books on Kindle? I read almost exclusively on Kindle these days because I am hopelessly out of bookshelf space (all the shelves are already double stacked 😭). I read on my phone Kindle app every chance I get.
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“Somebody please convince me not to drag a suitcase of books and paintings to Canada …”
Challenge accepted.
Your nightmare situation involves the CBSA operating on behalf of the Canada Revenue Agency, a suitcase full of books, paintings, and coffee, and a surly meathead of a CBSA agent who invents a scenario in which you’re smuggling books, paintings, and coffee into Canada under the guises of personal travel belongings and personal consumption so you may avoid import duties as well as the taxes on gifts over 60 CAD.
This will be used as a flimsy pretext for one of those infamous CBSA coerced border show trials once highlighted by such shows as “The Fifth Estate” which will be held in the secondary inspection area in which you are routed through the Canadian bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine as imagined by Franz Kafka.
Now imagine how well I might know this particular situation.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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