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Great in theory.Try being the guy/gal who needs armed back up, you are in some remotish place, nearest back up is a while away. When a gun is required for self defence, you usually have seconds to react. Unless of course you say "excuse mister bad guy, you are not playing fair, please put down your weapon until by armed back up arrives, then we can go back to playing guns"

Knowing numerous police officers and a handful of customs officers, knowing what they deal with on a regular basis, knowing how often the police are called to the border crossings, the customs officers at many land crossings do need to be armed.

Just something for you all to ponder....those "remotish" Canada Customs locations are conveniently located right next to US Customs. If things got SEVERELY out of hand I am pretty confident they wouldn't just watch ;) Its one of those "just do it and ask for forgiveness later" situations. Having worked at both remotish and very non-remotish ports of entry I can honestly say everyone that I worked with did not express concerns about not having firearms.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...l=968350116795

Against 90 million travellers, 30 Criminal Code infractions a year — none involving serious injury — are hardly reason for alarm, much less for a sweeping change of culture along the world's longest undefended border.

...and some of those, in more recent years are probably drunk driving offences which albeit serious are not likely threatening to the point of requiring guns! Also, if you require guns then be prepared to pay police officer wages and offer equivalent training, at least so far as it relates to similar duties.

Maybe wwe should decrease the other wages of gun carriers, to match the new ones :D

http://www.thetimesherald.com/apps/p...605080303/1002

Canada's Conservative Party, which has assumed majority in the country's government, put campaign promise into action Tuesday when it allotted $101 million in the next two years to arm the border.

Good point. Happens all the time. They definitely need guns :rolleyes:

Given that they had to evacuate the Peace Arch border crossing because an armed convict was thought to be trying to get through, about time!

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...0&refer=canada

Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Canada will start arming guards along its 3,145-mile border starting next year, as part of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's promise to bolster national security.

The plan to issue guns to more than 4,000 border officers will take 10 years to implement, the prime minister said today at a border crossing in British Columbia, according to Harper spokesman Dimitri Soudas. The Canada Border Services Agency will begin arming officers as early as September 2007 and 150 will carry guns by March 2008, Harper said.

Wow, that's a bristling defence of our border don't you think.

As a former Canadian Immigration Inspector who, in the course of five years, had a knife pulled on him and got into at least two additional altercations where force had to be used to subdue someone, I would have felt much more comfortable knowing that I would have the ability to protect myself and my colleagues by having a firearm - it's no different than for any police officer. I can think of numerous other instances where Customs located firearms in a vehicle belonging to individuals travelling up from the US who had numerous warrants out for their arrest and know of at least one case where a fleeing criminal presumed that Canadian Customs officers WERE armed under their winter gear and said afterwards that if he had known they were unarmed he would have tried to shoot his way across the border. Bear in mind, too, that I was not on one of the more notorious crossing points such as the Windsor Tunnel.

Bullet proof vests are fine - I wore one every day - but given that most of the people I was dealing with were no more than 10 feet away, it would have taken nothing for them to put a bullet into my head if they had had the inclination, thereby rendering the bullet proof vest useless. Tazers and CS spray may work (although query the issues surrounding tazer related deaths) but again, that is not an effective means of protection against someone carrying a loaded and drawn firearm in all circumstances.

The issue is not protecting Border Services people from terrorists but rather from all of the other kooks, wackos, nutters and fugitives who decide to make a run for the Canadian border.

I will readily acknowledge the statistics that say the vast majority of law enforcement officers shot in the line of duty are shot before they even have a chance to draw their weapon but when the border which these people are protecting is with one of the most armed nations in the world and where there are numerous instances of individuals with malicious intent trying to cross that border, we owe it to those in that line of work to allow them all the protection they can have. Why should they be in any different a position than the police? The public's perception of Customs and Immigration (at least on here) may be based primarily on images of people sitting in booths at airports scanning passports. I can assure you that life at 2 am on a land border is a very, very different creature.

I see your points DJC, but that's what the RCMP is for. Put more of them along the border. CBSA agents do not need to be armed -- this is not for safety and security, but rather gives the union another bargaining chip to argue for significant wage increases in the future. I believe the PMs renegotiate in a couple of years, so you can bet that this will become news at that time.

Heck, police officers working the streets and customs officers at the UK don't have guns, but batons, no?

That's the way their union sees it. From the Globe this morning, "When border guards, who earn up to $55,000 in base salary, are armed, Mr. Scott [a union vice-president] said he anticipates that their wages should rise to be more aligned with RCMP officers, who make $70,000 after their first three years of sservice."

You've never worked a remote border crossing at 3 in the morning have you...

This is what happens when we give the option of arming front line officers to pencil neck bureaucrats in Ottawa.

And from a friend in the inside that sat on CBSA-Union discussions over the arming issue, it's the EMPLOYEES who want more pay. They can work in a prison doing less work for more, but now that they have the added responsiblity of getting qualified and re-qualified, not to mention the additional burden of higher use of force, they feel they need more money. A lot of CBSA employees hate the CEUDA because they didn't give them wage increases when they received batons and OC spray.

I suggest all white-collared naysayers terrified of guns to give this a read, specifically page 28 (paragraph one), page 74 (tactical communication), page 87 (2nd line), page 98 (1st paragraph), page 99 (2nd and 3rd paragraph),
http://www.ceuda.psac.com/english/pu.../Northgate.pdf
http://www.ceuda.psac.com/english/ca...Northgate.html