Category: ukraine, russia, hungary

US/CANADA Border Crossing Regulations for Covid End Next Week

September 29, 2022

The federal government just announced that Covid-related regulations crossing the border will end next week. It has been a nightmare to cross the border for the past couple of years. The danger of people coming to Canada with Covid infections led the government to introduce the ARRIVECAN system, mandating people to fill out a complicated form on a cell phone before arriving in Canada. The Americans responded in kind, but strangely, traveling by air into the US was allowed with a negative Covid test while traveling by car was not permitted (unless you were an American citizen). 

Resulting from the different border crossing policies, I experienced the most bizarre situation last summer. I could not drive with Kathy to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (driving from Ottawa, one has to cross the border). Since Kathy is a dual Canadian/American citizen, she drove to Dulles airport near Washington, DC while I flew there the same day. Coming home was different; we drove together and entered the country as Canadian citizens. And, of course, we had to fill out the ARRIVECAN form before crossing the border.

I have been crossing the border for dog ages; early on, when I went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from Vancouver, I drove south to California and then across the US on Route 66. But even before, I remember our drive to Seattle from Vancouver with my father, who informed the American border guard he’ll stay in the US as little as possible. That comment did not sit well with the official who hauled us in for questioning and then had the benefit of trying to decipher my father’s heavy accent before letting us go.

I have always had some innate fear of talking with government officials, especially police and border guards, who brought back memories of the Hungarian secret police and the aura of the heavy hand of government officials. Border crossing was a chore for me those days, not immersed in the philosophy the police and similar organizations serve you, the citizens of Canada.

I was apprehensive when, with a friend of Italian origin, we drove to Seattle with my newly minted citizenship card in the 1960s. My friend warned me that border officials would haul him in and question him because of his Italian name. Surprised to hear that, I wondered if government officials had prejudices against nationalities, including Hungarians. And so it happened; we were subject to thorough questioning, but I escaped detailed scrutiny, and they let us go. Although this incident confirmed my apprehensions, my discomfort with government officials waned in time, especially after I had joined the government in 1973.

It was easy to cross the border into the US in the old days; all you needed was identification like a driver’s license, which, of course, I always carried with me. The reverse, crossing into Canada, was the same. But sometimes you did not even need a solid piece of ID, as when my son’s friend, a recent Russian immigrant to the US, came to visit us in a rented car with neither US citizenship nor a valid driver’s license. He successfully talked his way into Canada at the border and confirmed the ease with which one could enter Canada.

Many of our family border crossings started with camping in New York State. An hour’s drive from us in upper New York State, the pine-treed campgrounds were not only cheaper to stay at than comparable Canadian facilities, but were also less crowded. And, we found wine cheaper down there and the challenge was how to import wine to Canada. Some people suggested I should fill up the water tank of our tent trailer with wine coming home, but I resisted; the water container would have had a taste of having been filled with wine, not the taste of choice of family members. (The limit for importing wine was two bottles per adult). Then we discovered ‘two-buck chuck”, the wine distributed by Trader Joe’s, the retailer in the US.

A case of two-buck-chuck, even paying the customs duties was much cheaper than anything we could buy in Canada. Most of the time, the Canadian customs officials just waved us on when we told them we had a case of wine worth US $24, altho once they told us to go into the office and fill out all the customs papers. This experience cost us ten dollars, but I found it to be a real bother and time-consuming affair as well.

My good luck of never having trouble at the border rossing nto the US ran out when I arrived at the border with my carpentry tools in the car. They immediately sent me inside and took apart my car, checking all the tools. I was going to build a deck for my son’s house, but the border officials were suspicious that I had other intentions. They were afraid that I would take jobs away from Americans. It took over an hour to get on my way; I pointed to my gray hair and said I was retired and had no intention of working and taking a job away from the locals. Further, I explained to them I had lived in the US for years but came home to Canada for my career, which was over.

Complications arose when I mentioned I had an expired draft card with a 5A rating. The younger officials knew nothing about draft cards and I tried to describe the Vietnam war and how Americans were drafted for service. This entire episode came to a hilarious end when an older border guard burst out in a boisterous laugh and explained to the younger officials what had happened in the sixties. The bottom line was that they took away the draft card I cherished and carried with me all the time when I worked in Norfolk, Virginia, in the sixties.

But the border is a two-way street and I never forget the incident when I bought a bottle of liquor at the duty-free shop coming home and the Canadian border guard asked how many ounces were in the bottle (there was a limit on how much one could bring back home). I looked at the bottle for information but could find none. I told the official I bought it at the duty-free store and had to be a size permitted for import to Canada. But he would not budge and I was ready to consume part of the bottle when he suddenly decided to just let us go, looking at the lineup behind us. As soon as we crossed the border, I felt some corrugations on the bottom of the bottle, and lo-and-behold; I found the information I had been looking for.

But next week we will go back to the old days, and a passport will be sufficient to enter Canada. The US is already open with a Canadian passport. Hurrah! Were the heavy-handed regulations preventing the entry of people with Covid useful and worth the cost of losing the tourist business? We’ll not know unless the government undertakes a study of it.

America Triggered the Ukraine War?

June 23, 2022

I thought I could get a balanced view of news by listening to TV anchors and reading columnists from both the left and the right. I wrote a blog on this a few months ago. That was my thinking until I received an article from my cousin Tamas, who is in Vienna. He sent me an article presenting a scholarly view of the origin of the Ukraine war. The argument floored me.

You thought Russia started the war, right? Russia was massing its military for months on the Ukraine border before attacking. And remember, Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, so this war was a continuation of their aim to gain more territory. But no. Hungarian economist Karoly Lorant explains in an article in the conservative Hungarian daily Magyar Hirlap, that the war started way back in 1998 when the Americans passed a resolution to expand NATO, which President Clinton called a major foreign policy victory.

Going further back, Secretary of State James Baker told Gorbachev that if Germany as a whole could be a member of NATO, “NATO forces would not be extended as much as an inch to the east.” This was at a meeting at the Kremlin on February 9, 1990.

The world situation changed entirely when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, and fifteen independent states emerged. According to Lorant, one result was the Americans had begun to support the expansion of NATO and talked about a unipolar world, with the US being the global force.

Lorant cites events supporting the expansion of NATO via the “Partnership for Peace Program” to cooperate with and encourage the democratization of Eastern European countries (many belonged to the former Soviet Union).

National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a book “The Gand Chessboard” (1997) in which he explained that Belorussia and Ukraine were an important part of Russia, without which Russia was a weak country. Lorant’s thesis is that, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has lost its power, particularly considering the loss of Belorussia and Ukraine. While the Russians were losing ground, the Americans were intent on expanding NATO.

According to Lorant, the Russians have been pushed back since the 1990s and, from their point of view, the situation had become untenable. No surprise that in January 2022, in Geneva, the Russians wanted the Americans to guarantee that Ukraine does not become a member of NATO. The Americans refused the request. So Lorant concludes that the continuous squeezing of Russia since the 1990s has created the condition for the war and the primary culprit is the US.

Although the facts may be true, I do not buy for a minute the conclusions Lorant draws from them. Russia is the transgressor in the Ukraine war; it is an unprovoked war (even Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the right-wing leader of Hungary called Russia the aggressor in his speech on May 16, 2022). Ukraine did not invite the Russians to come in to help, unlike in the Cuban missile crisis (which, some people think, is comparable to the Ukraine situation), when Fidel Castro invited the Russians. Zelenski, the President of Ukraine, was elected democratically, and he did not invite the Russians to come into the country.

Second, the concept of territorial influence, that Russia has influence by right over Ukraine, or that historically Ukraine belongs to Russia, is not convincing today. That doctrine may have held water in the past, but now independent countries have the right to self-determination. In contrast to the Russian aim to recover lost territories, European countries have not gone back to their colonies trying to recover their lost territories.

Third, I think influence shows through technology and industrialization today and less via military action. The last time we visited Hungary, I expressed my surprise to Tamas at the high level of foreign ownership of grocery stores and banks. He explained foreign countries took over Hungary without a single life being lost by taking ownership of industry after Hungary declared independence in 1989 and the Soviets left the country in 1991.

For example, the spread of the iconic iPhone and Facebook has probably created more sustainable influence in countries where they are used than military action could ever provide. That is why brute military might with tanks appears old-fashioned to me and a losing idea in the long run. I thought that by using their natural resources and closer cooperation with the old Soviet satellite states, Russia could have established a successful industrial block. But, no; instead, they invaded a country with brute force.

And now I gather from Mr. Lorant’s scholarship that it was the US that triggered the war after continuous attempts to promote NATO and squeeze Russia until Russia saw no option but to invade Ukraine to regain its former territory.

So I learned that besides reading the full spectrum of left-to-right opinions in the west, which I thought would give me a balanced view, I should also read pro-Russian views, such as Lorant’s article, (based on excellent scholarship), that may substantially differ from our western view. That does not mean that Mr. Lorant changed my mind; he outlined a historical context that is interesting but irrelevant today. Just my opinion.

Free Bus Passes for Refugees in Ottawa

May 4, 2022

Ukrainian refugees arriving in Ottawa provided moving stories in the local newspaper, and discussions with friends centered on the ongoing war in Ukraine.

These discussions moved on from the war and focussed on how to help the refugees arriving in Ottawa. It was encouraging to learn the City councillor from Kanata suggested that free transit passes be provided to the refugees for six months upon arrival. Another Councillor expanded the motion to include all refugees, to be fair. The City Council passed the motion.

A friend of mine suggested that with the free passes, the refugees may get to know the city. I asked, “are you saying that they should sight-see?” And I immediately followed up by: “come on! Refugees try to establish themselves and their lives in a new country and new city, and sightseeing is the last thing they are interested in.”

I was a refugee and my first task, beyond feeding myself and finding a place to sleep, was to learn the English language. Being a refugee is a traumatic experience and just getting used to the local scene compared to the old country: the architecture, the people, the way people dress, the food, and the smell of the ocean gave me more than enough to absorb. Sightseeing was a concept perhaps in my dreams in the long run, but certainly not in my first few months upon arrival.

Here is my story: my hostess, a nurse, who had an old, big house in the Kitsilano area of Vancouver, found out that volunteers gave English lessons to Hungarians at the YMCA in downtown Vancouver. My brother and I hustled down there to learn the language a few days after our arrival. Our host gave us some bus tickets to get to the YMCA. We learned English during the day and practiced grammar at night. We did not take or have time to sightsee. It took us a few months to converse in English sufficiently well to give us the confidence to look for a job, which was our next priority.

A few blocks from where we lived was Dueck on Broadway, a large car dealership, and cars intrigued my brother, coming from Hungary where there were few. He approached Dueck and offered to wash cars. They said that would be fine, but he also had to jockey the cars for the wash. So my brother walked to the licensing bureau and in forty-eight hours got his driver’s license. He was happy with his first job in Canada and felt like he was on top of the world.

I followed the job ads in the local paper, the Vancouver Sun, every day. In a week, I found a job with a furrier dragging animal skins to show buyers for their appraisal, hundreds of skins each day. My first huge cultural learning curve was when the appraiser gave me a huge cash tip at the end of his work, which I refused to accept, saying I was just doing my job.

In Hungary, there was no tipping, all people worked for the government (under the communist system), and there was no incentive to work hard for the possibility of additional income. The appraiser looked at me with a questioning eye, but perhaps figured me out by listening to my strange accent and probably improper English. I thought I just did what they hired me for. And this experience was an initial step in my acculturation in Canada.

I worked there until it was time to think about going back to further my education. My brother did the same and eight months after arriving in Canada, we both enrolled at the University of British Columbia.

I remembered my refugee experience when talking with my friend, and it shocked me people have so little understanding of, or empathy for, what refugees go through when they arrive in a country new to them. But why should they? It is totally outside their frame of reference.

Even if sightseeing is an option with free bus tickets, where would you go in Ottawa on a bus? Would you go to the east or west of the city, get off, and walk around? The endpoints of bus routes are not tourist spots. And the bus stops in Ottawa are not within reasonable walking distance of many homes. It could be a tough slog in the middle of a cold winter to walk to a bus stop for people arriving from tropical climates.

And the local people who host refugees have cars and take the refugees to get their health and social insurance cards and take them to medical facilities if needed. Would the refugees ever use the free bus passes?

The provision of free bus passes to recent refugee arrivals made a nice headline in the newspaper and surely, some refugees would use them. But the priority for recent refugee arrivals is to find a place to live; learn the language; get a job and gain a career via schooling or retraining.

Perhaps free bus passes for all the poor would be a better option?

Thank You, University of British Columbia

March 14

The current Ukrainian war reminded me of escaping from Hungary in 1956 and the unlikely admission to UBC in the following year. I am immensely grateful for the understanding and opportunity the University of British Columbia afforded me.

When I came home from school on the last day of October 1956, my mother ordered me and my brother to walk to Vienna. She did not explain why we should leave until months later: she had heard that when The Hungarian Revolution broke out in Budapest, on October 23, soldiers guarding the “iron curtain” (the border between Hungary and Austria) stood aside while the refugees crossed the border.

My brother, 18, and I, 16 years old, left with a sandwich and a name on a piece of paper that my mother told us to call when arriving in Vienna. The name on the slip of paper turned out to be a Jesuit priest, a college mate of my uncle’s at the University of Vienna. The priest picked us up from the refugee camp and settled us in Vienna. Just before the border closed, when the Russian tanks returned to occupy Hungary, my parents and younger brother also left Hungary and joined us. They thought they may never see us again.

We ended up in Vancouver in January 1957. I was 17 years old and hated the thought of going back to high school; I felt suddenly mature beyond my age because of the uprooting from Hungary to Canada via Vienna and Manchester, England. They were going to put me back a year because of my poor English language skills. That was abhorrent to me. I thought of attending university instead. But I was only in grade 10 when we escaped from Hungary; how could I apply to university?

Unbeknownst to my parents, I looked up when registration took place at UBC in the Fall and took a bus there. The admissions officer’s first question was to ask for my high school diploma, which, of course, I did not have. Actually; I had no papers to even show that I had been in high school. In my tortuous English (which I had learned in Manchester and courses at the YMCA in Vancouver) I said that I had not finished high school, but I was confident that I could do the science courses. Like maths, physics, and chemistry. But she said that I needed to have the graduation papers. I responded I would take a chance and if I could not pass the courses, I would just fail. Well, the officer went to the back office to discuss my unique request and after a half-hour; she came back and said that it was my choice and my money if I failed, but they would let me take the chance.

Then, she told me the fee for the semester was $250. Feeling foolish and by now totally embarrassed, I said that I had no money. But I improvised and said that the government, I heard, was paying for the tuition of Hungarian refugees. That, of course, caused another long discussion in the back room. I waited nervously with bated breath. After a substantial time, the officer came back and said that UBC would accept me with no payment. I sighed and my heartbeat came down a few notches. Although I was uptight with my heart pounding, the entire negotiation occurred in a friendly and relaxed manner.

And I did UBC proud; I excelled in all the sciences. My weakest performance was in the mandatory English language courses. I was fortunate to have Professor Woodcock for my English course, who gave me a “P” or pass mark; he was aware of my background and valued the effort I put into learning the language.

So thank you UBC. You were gracious and understanding. And you can be proud, I finished UBC with an architecture degree. I followed it up with a couple of masters’ degrees in the States. And made my career in Canada since 1973.

Without your understanding and taking a chance on a 17-year-old refugee in 1957, I could not have made a successful career, grown a happy family in, and given back in services to, Canada. Thank you!

What if the Russians Take Over Ukraine?

March 10, 2022

The Russian bully is devastating Ukraine by bombing. Atrocities abound: they bombed hospitals, with children inside. It is unfathomable in today’s world what is going on. The type of ground war going on in Ukraine belongs to the past. A hundred years ago, maybe. But today, with the technology and nuclear power that many nations possess, this old-fashioned war is an anachronism. Be it as it may, it is happening and the Ukrainians are putting up a terrific fight to keep their country.

Why? Well, first, it is their country. It is human nature to protect your house, country, your territory. Property is important globally; people fight for their piece of land. That people can deprive you of your property by crude force is wrong.

Second, the Ukrainian people know the Russians from the time they were part of the Soviet Union and their experience had not been a happy one under Soviet rule. There was the collectivization of farms; confiscation of private property; forbidding free discussion except for communist dogma.

Communism following the Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin doctrine had not materialized, as originally conceived in the Soviet Union. For example, the tiny pieces of land, minuscule vegetable gardens farmers could keep for their use, flourished, while the large collectivized farms, the “kolhozes”, suffered a failure. The lesson learned was that people should be rewarded according to their efforts and initiative. When all people are rewarded equally regardless of their effort and contribution, people do the least effort since those who produce more are rewarded the same as those who produce less.

No doubt Ukrainians are against the Russians and what they would do to their country should they take over the country. But what would happen to the average Ukrainian? Suppose you are an electrical inspector working for a small city where you live. Your job is to go out every day and inspect what people do in their homes, to their electrical circuits, and make sure their activities meet the local code. What would happen after that Russians take over? Would you not be doing the same work? The work is important and will continue to exist and therefore your job would be safe and continue. So why would you object to having a Russian-controlled government when your job would remain and your current boss may continue to be your future boss?

Because the ongoing Russian bombing has devastated homes, killed people, and created a terrifying environment. Fierce resistance and hatred have developed towards the Russians.

The only way the Russians can take over Ukraine now is by installing the military to run the country. The current Ukrainian administration will be arrested, imprisoned, sent to reeducation camps, or executed (similar to what happened in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968). And that will further increase quiet resistance and non-compliance with Russian rules.

In the near term, there will be the reconstruction of roads, of homes, destroyed. The infrastructure for utilities will have to be replaced. The quality of life will decrease because of the rubble and devastation. In Hungary, they rebuilt little of the infrastructure that was destroyed in WWII while Hungary was behind the Iron Curtain.

Over time, from the top government officials down, the administration would turn into a pro-Russian team, advocating loyalty to President Putin. And Russians would control the media and propaganda would work to turn Ukrainians anti-West.

Oligarchs would gradually take over Ukrainian industry, concentrate power and wealth in a few hands similar to what happened in Russia. Resource development would be only for the benefit of Russia, robbing the country of its natural resources similar to what happened in the satellite countries under the Soviet Union (Hungary, Czechoslovakia). Disagreement with government (i.e. Russian) policies would not be tolerated and dissidents jailed.

Since independence in 1991, Ukrainians have embraced western lifestyles. A change going back to the Soviet ways of life would be catastrophic to Ukrainians. Just my opinions.