Well I'm done with Canada forever.

It sucks. Since leaving the entertainment industry I've only had a couple searches where they put the dog thru and toss all your stuff and make a mess but when it's a "band" they pull out all the stops. The part I didn't like was being treated like a criminal BEFORE they search and find nothing. Can't they at least be nice while they slip on the rubber glove?

 

Oh, I understand perfectly. There is a tendency of citizens of most first-world countries to believe the rights they enjoy in the normal course of their lives also apply at the border... they don't. That belief sometimes gets reinforced if you frequently cross the border without issue, until... BAM!

 

Anyone with extensive international business travel will usually travel with a "dummy" phone/tablet/computer. The device is fully functional, but contains no private nor proprietary information. Some companies enact an internal policy and maintain "travel" electronics for just this purpose. When the traveller gets to the destination they can log into their employer's server, or the "cloud", and download what they need. Then when they're done, they wipe the device and head home.

 

Oh, and you want to talk about a b***h from h**l? A former partner's girlfriend first worked for Canada Border Services Agency as a border guard and then she went to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA--our version of the IRS) as an auditor. She used to laugh about how much she enjoyed ruining people's days, or in some cases, lives.

 

You should ask a Canadian lawyer that.....

I did Canada a few times as a driver, never bothered, went once on a personal trip to Point Roberts, and had my car tossed and was interrogated before being allowed entry.

 

If a driver is truly concerned they can eliminate most things on their devices by backing up to one of the cloud services, deleting those things on their device and then make sure you set the parameters for the service so you have to log in every time, rather than maintain an "open" application on the device.

 

In the days before readily available cloud services and easily accessible corporate servers a person would encrypt their device (which you can still do of course), but then you had to be careful because travel to certain countries could put you in violation of export or import laws based on the encryption software itself.