Canadian woman refused U.S. entry because of depression

[HereSince1628]

8. She says it turned on a hospital record...which might imply US access or possession of Canadian

records that include hospitalization records and it might not. On it's face that should obviously raise some eyebrows.

But is the story as she has stated it? Maybe and maybe not. Critical reading means leaving room for consideration and possibilities of things that weren't included in the story. And the questions raised by critical thinking must be answered if something near the truth is to be achieved.

Why would a border guard care about illness of a person seeking entry?
For reasons of public health, communicable disease in persons seeking entry has long been an issue at points of entry for many countries.

Yet, mental illness clearly isn't communicable. Suicidal ideation, being nothing more than thoughts, has no physical symptoms.
So how did the issue of a past suicide get raised at all?

She claims it was a hospitalization record. Ok. How did the border guard come to be looking for such a record? Is that routine or is it a question invoked by something in evidence?

Ms. Richardson uses a wheel-chair as a consequence of her failed suicide. Perhaps she offered that information in response to a general question about her wheel-chair use. An 'I attempted suicide' response may have set in motion the unhappy, flawed, chain of events that led to her exclusion. Of course that's speculation. If I was a critically minded reported I might try to nail down an answer to that question from Ms. Richardson or the border police (although it's quite likely the border security wouldn't provide a specific answer).

Why would she say something like that? Because it's an important part of her persona. She wrote a book and gives talks about suicide.

Yet, Ms Richardson says it was a hospital record that stopped her. Taking that at face value there is the question of how the existence of that record was confirmed within the relatively short period of time she was delayed. Was a phone inquiry made to a Canadian agency, that was researched, and nothing more than a confirmation of a hospital record about the suicide transmitted, or was the data researched in a US database accessed by the border agent?

We don't know and we aren't likely to get an answer from the US government, because of its policy of not discussing security methods.

If all this ended with Ms. Richardson, as a critical reporter I might say this is a one-off weirdness. Is this a one-off or is it a pattern?

According to a link in the original article, Ms Richardson isn't the only Canadian stopped for a past suicide attempt during a secondary screening for US entry in Toronto (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canadians-with-mental-illnesses-denied-u-s-entry-1.1034903). It's completely unclear why these other Canadian citizens were selected for secondary screening, and it is unclear how the information about their past suicidal concern came to be an issue.

There is an ugly looking pattern of US border agent activity and it isn't understood by the public on either side of our common border.

From an American point of view that is sensitive to the rights of the mentally ill, I find this pattern of exclusion offensive. Based on my reading of the law it seems likely to be based on a twisted interpretation of law by a someone in a supervisory position of US border agents in Toronto.

America has an abundance of fearful persons in our police and security services who may be motivated to push their implementation of laws past the intended bounds.

We don't exclude persons who have had communicable diseases but are recovered from them. We shouldn't exclude persons who have had mental illness and are recovered from them. The law states fairly clearly that the concern is of something likely to happen, and the only concern the US really has is within a time-frame relevant to a visitor's sojourn within the US.

I hope it's limited to one supervisor in Toronto, but I don't know if it is. This could go way up the ladder to one of the persons hired under the terribly paranoid Dick Cheney when US HSD was organized after the World Trade Center attacks.

I find very troubling the prospect of US Homeland Security maintaining a database of the health records of citizens of foreign countries --whatever US HSD is willing to do to Canadians, it's likely willing to do on US citizens.

It's worrisome to me that I recently received a pamphlet from the US Veterans Affairs administration, outlining in obviously overly simplistic terms, that without my authorization the VA hospitals will share information from my medical records with police and security agencies.

But I don't know that in these other Canadian cases that such a US database was used. The database may belong to some Canadian institution which either has granted access to, or provides real time answers to queries from, US Homeland Security.

Of course, the Canadian perspective on that is somewhat different and should be troubling to Canadians. Canadians have some reasonable and serious questions to ask of their government. Why, how, and under what circumstance do foreign border agents working in Toronto get information from the medical records of Canadian citizens? What does Canadian sovereignty mean to a Canadian citizen's privacy?