Hey, the Jason-crossing-the-Canada-border story is not remotely nefarious unless you want to look for nefariousness. It’s a story about having adequate proof.

So here’s the definition of essential versus non-essential travel.

Backstopping all of this is that you not only have to *be* essential; you have to *prove* you’re essential. If you work as a doctor in Toronto and you show up at the border and say, “hey, I’m a doctor in Toronto...”

...they’re going to say, “oh? prove it” and if you say “ha ha no proof,” they’ll ship you back.

If you say, “here’s a letter from my Aunt Gracie, she runs a lollipop shop in Miami!” they also will ship you back because that‘s not proof, either.

If you have a letter from the hospital that you work at, or a hospital ID? Now we are closer to proof.

So back to Jason. We don’t know what happened exactly, but it sounds like this: He goes to the border, and he says, “Hey, I’m essential, I’m training as a figure skater,” and the border crossing guard reads the definition and says, “ehhh that says recreational, not essential.”

So Jason, Not a Lawyer, says something like no, I’m not a *recreational* figure skater. I’m a *competitive* figure skater. I’m the US silver medalist, the Four Continents silver medalist. I win things! Please look up my Wikipedia page.

And the guy says, sure sure anyone can edit anything into a Wikipedia page, but do you have any Proof? Like real Proof on Letterhead that I can photocopy so I don’t get in trouble.

And no, Jason doesn’t have any real proof.

So he goes back and gets letters from USFS and from Skate Canada that says “Jason Brown is an honest-to-gosh competitive figure skater.”

And MAYBE that sounds nefarious to you because look! people with power! vouching for him!

But it’s also a letter saying “Jason is skating competitively at a very high level for this country” from literally the ONLY people who can vouch that he is skating competitively at a very high level.

If he could only get a letter from his Aunt Mabel the lollipop shop owner saying, “no no, Jason is the BEST figure skater in America, maybe second best behind that Nathan Chen guy,” and *not* from an official body? It wouldn’t actually be proof.

In any event, if it sounds nefarious for border crossing to turn you away several times even though you are actually qualified to enter, and then say, “oh, ha ha, welcome!” the instant you get an official document, I have some bad news for you about immigration in GENERAL.

I did not carry this man’s banners from Kelowna to Japan and then mail them to North Carolina and then get them back for Korea just so that I could be quiet when people were accusing him of immigration shenanigans!