Category: Miscellaneous

The official death toll from the tsunami that hit Japan last Friday now stands at around 2,400. The estimated death toll from the earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12, 2010 lies between 92,000 and 316,000.

The Atlantic has an interesting article exploring might account for that difference:

From The Economist’s Gulliver blog:

“Given the myriad fees already imposed by Canada’s government and airlines on passengers, another one should hardly rankle. But the American government’s proposed $5.50 inspection fee for Canadian flyers has prompted plenty of squawking. (…)

But the proposed inspection fee, which was introduced in the 2012 US budget, is not actually a new one, but rather an end to an exemption air and marine travellers from Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean have enjoyed since 1997. Some 16m Canadians fly to the US every year, so the fee would raise about $90m from Canada alone—chump change given America’s projected $1.6 trillion budget deficit for 2012.

A recent survey by the Hotel Association of Canada showed that 21% of Canadians drove to an American airport last year to benefit from cheaper airline tickets for US or foreign travel, up from 18% in 2009. It’s unlikely that another $5.50 fee will stem that traffic.”

More often than not, I fly into Burlington, VT when I visit my family in Montreal. Burlington airport is just small enough to process travelers extremely quickly, the average person who works there is considerably more courteous than the average Montreal Trudeau airport employee, and the two-hour drive between Burlington, VT and my parents’ house on the South Shore of the St. Lawrence River goes through some of the most beautiful countryside in North America.

I expect to fly into Burlington even more than I used to. I would guess this diversion of traffic from Canadian to US airports is what US policy makers had in mind when they ended the exemption, which makes this a protectionist measure.