More Bad Press for Montreal
The Air Tags controversy further darkens the cloud over Montreal as a vacation spot for Vermonters
There is a feed on the Reddit social news aggregator called “New to Vermont,” discussing questions raised by those who moved to the state recently, and it featured a thread on the question “what made you want to move to Vermont?” the two most common answers from commenters were that Vermont is quiet and has no large cities, and that Vermont features a lot of green space and is a good place for someone who enjoys winter weather. Not a single person on the thread mentioned Vermont’s proximity to the Canadian border and the ability to be in Montreal in a little over an hour, at least from the northern half of the state. As we have noted in this newsletter, Canada (or more precisely, Quebec) plays little role in the 21st century Vermont mind. In many cases, Vermont’s proximity to Canada is not a source of excitement or diversion, or even a source of income for the state’s airports and retailers. It is now becoming a threat.
The U.S.-Canadian border made the headlines on the Vermont local news for the first time in a while this last week, as police officials asked members of the public who recently traveled to Montreal by car to check their vehicles for tracking devices. A number of Vermont vehicles returned from Montreal with Apple’s “Air Tags” placed upon them These are GPS tracking devices with legitimate uses such as maintaining the location of checked luggage or other devices undergoing shipment. Canada has experienced a recent wave of car thefts, many of which are brought to the port of Montreal for shipment overseas, often to Africa. The theft rings appear to place GPS devices on cars marked for theft later on. The criminal rings usually place the devices in the front grills of cars, and those carrying Apple devices are able to use them to detect Air Tags traveling with the phones. Since most Vermonters headed to Montreal take short trips, often same-day visits, there have been few reports of actual thefts, and the tracking devices are being found after the fact. Nevertheless, it is just the latest example of a news story about the Vermont-Quebec border with an undertone of reconsider any plans you may have to visit Canada.
Vermont media now feature three major stories about problems Vermonters may encounter when visiting Canada, and together they are discouraging the state’s residents from going to Canada. The first is an old problem that verges on disinformation. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the U.S.-Canada border was closed to non-essential traffic for nearly two years. When it reopened for vaccinated travelers, those crossing the border needed to upload their vaccination and potential quarantine information using a smartphone application called ArriveCan. While this was a minor requirement for a vaccinated traveler comfortable with technology, the Canadian government assumed everyone carried a smartphone with international data service, and imposed onerous penalties on those who did not fill out the app ahead of time. ArriveCan stopped being mandatory in September 2022, but as long as it was required, points of entry along the border remained very quiet, and very few Americans crossed the border by car for pleasure. And the memories of ArriveCan have been long lasting, with Vermonters, not aware that it is no longer used at land entries, still citing it as a reason for not visiting Canada. Pandemic restrictions, and memories of them, have only piled onto the thickening of the border that followed the 2001 terrorist attacks, especially the requirement for Americans to have a passport or an enhanced driver's license (which Vermont’s DMV offers but in practice struggles to produce) to re-enter from Canada.
In June 2022, Québec's National Assembly passed Bill 96, “An Act respecting French, the official and common language of Québec,” which significantly amended the Charter of the French Language, the 1977 law making French Quebec’s only official language. The law strengthened measures to protect the use of French and arrest its perceived decline in Montreal, but it explicitly did not affect tourists. While Quebec residents, aside from immigrants in their first six months of residence, had to receive all services from the Quebec government in French, temporary visitors such as American tourists had no restrictions upon their use of English. However, there were misleading stories in the Vermont media that the public use of English was itself being criminalized and that tourists risked harassment if they used English in restaurants or stores. This has been compounded since last December, when the Quebec government announced a significant hike in university tuition fees for students from outside the province on the grounds that anglophone students from McGill and Concordia Universities were speaking too much English on the streets of downtown Montreal. American media who noted this story took it as an accusation that American visitors were causing the decline of French in Quebec, and that Francois Legault’s government was threatening these visitors with charges under Bill 96.
American tourism to Canada has not recovered since the pandemic, even though international travel has featured prominently in Americans’ “revenge spending” since 2022 and the Canadian dollar remains below 80 American cents. With respiratory viruses slowly returning to be a seasonal phenomenon, 2024 would ordinarily feature a bumper summer travel season. Unfortunately, cross-border travel, especially by Vermonters along the Quebec border, looks like it will still operate under a public relations cloud.
References:
https://arrivecan.cbsa-asfc.cloud-nuage.canada.ca/en/welcome
https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/29/hidden-airtags-road-trips-to-canada/
https://www.wcax.com/2024/03/28/montreal-criminals-targeting-local-travelers-with-airtags/
https://vtdigger.org/2024/03/28/crossing-the-border-watch-out-for-tracking-devices/
https://www.wcax.com/video/2024/03/28/montreal-criminals-targeting-local-travelers-with-airtags/
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/29/montreal-criminals-airtag-car-theft/
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/airtag-stolen-car-apple-canada-b2480197.html
https://www.sevendaysvt.com/guides/do-quebecs-aggressive-steps-to-protect-french-go-too-far-38493858
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/vermont-librarian-arrivecan-app-1.6562293
https://www.wcax.com/2022/09/21/scott-praises-end-canadian-covid-border-requirements/
https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/border-area-politicians-urge-ottawa-to-drop-arrivecan-app
https://www.fodors.com/community/canada/is-the-language-barrier-a-problem-in-quebec-117019/
https://macleans.ca/longforms/quebec-french-language-laws/
https://cultmtl.com/2021/08/a-rant-from-an-american-about-french-language-issues-in-quebec/