I really like panel 2’s bureaucrat, with his ready-made FAIL stamp and tiny smile as he prepares to crush yet another one of the hopeless, unwashed rabble that show up at his desk.

My hometown is about a fifteen minute drive from American border. In times past, all you usually needed was your drivers’ licence to cross back and forth easily. The Canadian and American border crossing buildings were roughly the size of small houses and the guards typically polite if not friendly. In the last decade or so,  many changes have been made, especially to the American side; the size of their facility has been greatly expanded, the guards seem to have gotten rather more brusque, and a simple driver’s licence is no longer enough. Now, you need a valid passport. (Or a NEXUS card, whatever that is)

So: the Canadian government makes a huge push to urge all citizens to get passports, which is when this comic takes place. Simultaneously, our provincial government spends loads of money to roll out the Enhanced ID Card as an optional alternative. It’s your driver’s licence but with some extra security features, and as a bonus it’s supposed to work in place of a passport at border crossings. By all accounts it was actually a great deal more hassle to get than a standard passport, and on top of that, if you wanted to travel outside of North America you’d of course need a regular passport anyway.

(This next is unfounded rumor, but I also heard that in one instance the border guards didn’t like the EID and made the driver produce a passport all the same)

So of course everybody got passports, and the special Enhanced ID Centre offices that were built around the province (including one in my hometown) went underused and were eventually shut down, while the provincial government cried that it couldn’t understand why nobody wanted EID cards. [June 7, 2012]