Excuse [2]

Oh, and should you need an excuse to never for a moment entertain the notion of changing your citizenship -- or, conversely, of getting the hell of Dodge now while you can and never returning -- consider the case of Canadian citizen, Maher Arar.

The United States can't guarantee there won't be a repeat of the Maher Arar deportation case, the American ambassador said today.

Paul Cellucci, commenting after speaking to a conference on Canada-U.S relations, said that the United States respects the Canadian passport, but reserves the right to act unilaterally when it sees a need to protect its security.

His remarks came a week after Paul Martin, the incoming prime minister, spoke strongly about the need to respect Canadian passports to prevent a recurrence of the incident in which Arar was arrested in New York and deported to his Syrian birthplace, rather than to Canada.

Arar, a Canadian citizen, spent a year in a Syrian jail, where he says he was tortured. He was released without charges in October.

The Americans said he was an Al Qaeda terrorist suspect, although he was never charged with a crime in any country.

It's mindboggling, isn't it, why our northern neighbors dislike us so?