Passing the Ottawa IQ test

It’s official. The great pandemic poutine famine is nearing its end.

Canadian premier Justin Trudeau has announced that, beginning August 9 U.S. citizens will once again be allowed to cross into the Great White North. More than 14 months after the gates came down and the welcome mat was pulled up, International Falls will be international again.

It was a particularly unnerving moment in a generally unnerving year. It wasn’t like our Good Neighbor to the North announced they were building a wall and we were going to be paying for it, but all of a sudden that 5,525 mile unfortified boundary which always seemed more like a suburban property line than the Berlin Wall was turned into a legally impenetrable DMZ.

The whole thing gave me a left out, locked out sort of feeling. Not that I had any particular plans to go there, but what if I wanted to? After all, it is less than 600 miles to Winnipeg…

Somehow, it sort of felt like I was being sent to my room…

I guess that’s because Canada’s never seemed like a real foreign country … y’know, like Turkey or France or Azerbaijan. Canadians pay in dollars, drive on the right side of the road, speak English with a North American accent and know how to drive in snow. Canada’s always felt like sort of a continent-wide Minnesota – a Minnesota with snow capped mountains on one side and all-you-can-eat lobster on the other; a Minnesota where, when you head Up Nort, north doesn’t stop ‘till you find yourself on the other side of the world headed Down Sout.  Folks up there fish for walleye, wear flannel, and are pretty much indistinguishable from Minnesotans around here – except they know how far their car will go on a liter of gas.

But that pesky virus put the kibosh on all those years of neighborly feeling. Folks from the U.S. hadn’t been so officially unwelcome since we showed up with muskets and an acquisitive attitude during the War of 1812. The Treaty of Ghent put an end to that situation, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson and Johnson the current one.

Of course, they’re not letting just any Tom, Dick or Harry in. A country that gave us both Captain Kirk and Mr. Scott (AKA William Shatner and James Doohan), not to mention Alex Trebek, is too smart to endanger the national IQ by letting folks in who aren’t smart enough to protect themselves (and everybody else) against the virus that started it all. If you want to get your limit of trophy lake trout and arctic grayling up on Great Slave Lake you’d best have your vaccination complete and a recent negative COVID test to back it up. Folks up there can get Fox News and so they know there are quite a number of folks down here who aren’t too smart.

I suppose saying that is going to put some folks’ nose out of joint, but like Mom used to tell me, the truth hurts. That damn virus hasn’t gone anywhere – in fact it’s gotten a darn sight catchier. The only reason we’re able to go around with our noses hanging out and pie holes uncovered is that enough folks have used the good brains God gave us and gotten our COVID shots. Consequently, 99.7 percent of people currently catching COVID are people who haven’t been vaccinated.

Let’s say that again in a different way – if you got the shot you’re not getting sick. If you don’t get the shot, given time, the virus is gonna get you.  And if enough people get sick, we go back to wearing masks, staying home and having a whole lot more funerals than we ought to.

We ought to be smarter than that … we really ought to.

We ought to be smart enough to be Canadian.