For Anymouse:

Canada is going to let vaccinated US of Americans into their lovely country starting on August 9. Vaccination will be proven by scanning or photographing a vaccination card and uploading it using the ArriveCAN system, either as an app on your smartphone, or via a desktop computer web browser. It appears that Canada will do away with the current requirement to have a recent COVID PCR test in addition to being vaccinated, and they’re going to let kids under 12 enter with their vaccinated parents, no quarantine.

This is all preliminary, but I want to address one thing that comes up in the comments whenever vaccine passports are mentioned: Any of these passport mechanisms work better with a smartphone, but they do work without one. Every time I mention a passport, there are comments from people who don’t have a smartphone — you can log in at your library and print out the passport. That said, how the fuck do you people travel without a smartphone? Do you print out maps from Mapquest? Do you have your Rand McNally on your lap the whole time? As someone who’s old enough to have traveled pre-smart-phone, my God, what a game-changer they are when traveling to a place you’ve never been.

That said, a cheap smartphone with a modest data plan is $109 / $30/month at Cricket Wireless, and the Lifeline program subsidizes data for folks who can’t afford a cell phone. Another point: the passport regimes that I’ve seen are generally coupled with an activity that costs a fair amount of money — tickets to a professional sporting event, international travel, and the like. Nobody has proposed a passport to get into the grocery store.

Anyway, with this act, Canada joins the ranks of other sovereign nations, principally Fox News, who have also developed a vaccine passport (in Fox’s case, for their employees), because the one thing that Tucker Carlson and Justin Trudeau have in common is that neither one of them wants to come in contact with unvaccinated Americans.

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