It was a piece of cake with Nexus. The queue to hand in the customs form was absolutely dreadful. The line was so long people were not going to the end to join. They were cutting in at the front and middle, thus making it 20X longer for everyone else.

Everyone should point at them like this

What flight were you on?

I would have looked for you at the London Pride bar in Heathrow!

🌈 🥃

well... that was much better. Through Pearson almost as quickly as I could walk yesterday. Key tactics were:
- use the ArriveCan app [thanks whoever suggested that]
- walk fast from the de-planing [even better would have been to fly in the front of the plane, but...]
- I was directed to that first randomly located bank of machines by someone who clearly hated their job and me, it all went quickly
- walked through the slightly puzzling arrangement that has me walking through the main set of machines on my way to the human check, but i was ably directed by some people who also hate their jobs but seemed somewhat more ambivalent about me personally
- short wait there, and instead of going to a booth, a uniformed person looked at my paper and waved me through - that has never happened before, so perhaps it was an app thing?
- no checked luggage, so hand the paper with its newly added red line and I was out!

But Avis made up a tiny bit of the shortfall... do all the paperwork, show my license, etc etc. Get to the car, put my luggage in the boot, drive to the exit and hand over the paperwork. Then get told I had to show my license [which was in the boot]... the one I just showed your colleague 20 metres away? The very one.

And for those in the Toronto area yesterday, that ice pellet/sleet/freezing rain was an unwelcome addition to my reintroduction to the video game style of driving on Toronto's highways.

I don't get the purpose of Arrivecan....or rather I don't see the benefit. You enter everything in the app and still have to go to a machine to confirm it all, take a pic, print off the crappy thermal print piece of paper with a very poor picture of you and go see a CBSA officer, get asked questions, let through, pick up bags (or not if in transit at YYZ but you do in YHZ), hand piece of paper to second CBSA officer and then you are on your way. The only difference in not using Arrivecan as far as I can see is that you in theory get in a longer line up for the machine. Except that if you go to the arrivecan line there's nothing to prove that you've actually done arrive can and you can skip the longer line up and go to the machines to do the full declaration. And that full declaration doesn't seem much different from what you do if you've already done it on the app. It's all needlessly bureaucratic and pointless, making the UK e-passport gates and green/red lane seem effortless by contrast.

Yep!

I'm flying from Pearson to Gatwick next week, Perhaps that trip will go smoothly and my deep hatred for YYZ will fade.

Two things seemed different to me, using Arrivecan this trip vs the cluster in August. I did the machine thing and I **think** the printed slip had less writing but included a number that might have been an ArriveCan validation? Then, when I got to the front of the queue, a uniformed Border Control [ie : not one of the grumpy, madly gesticulating people who had been shepharding us around previously] took one look at the slip and pointed me to the exit/baggage pick up.

I assumed ArriveCan was the difference, but perhaps I just got lucky.

I went through Pearson today. Quite successful. Third immigration machine worked. Bags within an hour, I thought I was going to have to say it all went smoothly. The parking payment machine didn't work though, didn't recognize entry of a credit card, didn't return ticket. There's no English language support so, in the end, I paid the "lost ticket" maximum fee.

At the end of the baggage hall there was, of course, the officer collecting mouth paper and the inevitable Asian man with an overloaded trolley and no piece of mouth paper. A contra-flow system developed as people arrived at stuck Asian man, turned, and walked back into the baggage hall to try the other officer. They do it deliberately, they have to, if the officers didn't want this chaos they'd introduce signage explaining their crazy system or just move into the 20th century.