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Comment by CoolGuySteve | Hacker News Reader

There's an entertaining CGP Grey video about other oddities in the US-Canada border.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMkYlIA7mgw

Considering how inconvenient it is in some geographies and how small the patches of land are, I'm always surprised the State Department doesn't negotiate a land exchange treaty with Canada to fix what are essentially cartography bugs.

Both sides would spend a few tens of millions compensating people for land seizures and dealing with the administrative overhead of negotiating and ratifying the deal but would gain it back over time with simplified border stations.

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There's a fantastic film about this very plight. It's called Super Troopers 2. ;P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEed-o8fVpM (possibly nsfw)

I grew up in Delta near Point Roberts. It's a part of America located on the southern end of a peninsula, the rest of which, is part of British Columbia. They have an elementary school but not a high school in point roberts. So, when I was in high school, most of the people from Point Roberts would be bussed into Tsawwassen but we had a bus that would bring a few of them to the high school I went to.

That seems like a perfect area that could be part of your land exchange idea. All the teenagers there end up going to school in Canada anyway. There's only one crossing between Point Roberts and Canada.

Then where will Canadians deliver their EBay, Amazon and other US vendor packages?

Have you seen how much cheaper auto parts are in USA?

Blaine. :)

I don't understand what you're trying to say. US residents can't register their children for public school in Delta or Surrey. There is a school bus that goes from point Roberts to Blaine every day, with special permission to bypass the border checkpoint, which takes all of the Point Roberts high school students to the HS in Blaine.

Some people in Point Roberts have dual citizenships. Some of the ones with both Canadian and American citizenships had their kids attend school in Canada. My highschool and a closer one in south delta had a bus for those people. Sorry my original comment was kind of unclear. There was about 6 people that took the bus from there whike I was going to school there, there was about 2000 people in my school.

Even with dual citizenship, people can't just send their kids to a Canadian school if it's not their primary residence. In BC you have to show proof of location to register a kid for school, either you own your home, or you show a copy of your lease, utility bills, etc.

If I had to guess they were using relatives' houses claimed as their actual residential address. This has been a problem in Vancouver recently with people claiming false residence addresses to register their kids for the "good" elementary schools in yaletown and kitsilano.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington#Ed...

https://web.archive.org/web/20121105113833/http://www.canada...

>Canadian kids are allowed to attend Delta's school district.

If it's a handful, they might just give a fee exemption of some sort and eat the cost. May as well prepare them for Canadian university that they'll inevitably attend because it's cheaper since they'll pay local rate.

> That same year, a 16-year-old [...], 10th-grader <redacted>, allegedly smuggled $25,000 US worth of marijuana across the Peace Arch border on school buses designated to transport Point Roberts students to Blaine, Wash., schools.

lol, but makes me wonder where/how they picked up their stock.

Cartographic "bugs" are features to politicians.

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