U.S. tourists welcome in Canada

That sounds like a win to me

What generally happens to one who enters Canada on a tourist visa, and overstays? Are they generally on top of that shit and will find you and give you the boot? Or is it like a "lay low, don't draw attention to yourself, and you can fly under the radar" type thing?

Asking for a friend.

There are worse things than being stuck in Canada.

Why return?

American citizens haven't been getting detained at the border like people from outside the states and I doubt they ever will be. Secret police can just scoop you up on the streets if they really want to go after you

The correct feeling is shame. We should be ashamed of this country and its people.

No worries eh, we get it. Come on over!

Plus, if you need to buy absolutely anything, enjoy a nice discount on our non-tariffed goods - iphones, spices, car tires, fill your boots.

Just don’t wear an American flag on anything and you’ll be fine!

Don't want you here, bye.

In addition to what these articles recommend, you should turn off your device before going through customs. If you decide to power it on or not, that's up to you. However, you should NOT unlock it for the first time.

Your phone (either android or iPhone) forensically has two states - BFU (before first unlock) and AFU (after first unlock). You may not think this is a big difference but it's actually huge. After your device has its first unlock it's much more susceptible to forensic data extraction. The BFU state on several devices is, as far as publicly known, immune to AFU extraction with Cellebrite. Naturally older devices or those that weren't designed with security in mind are susceptible in either state.

Look into GrapheneOS and their user forum if you want to learn more about this as well as what devices have decent protection against forensic data extraction

tl,dr - power off and optionally back on your phone but don't do the first login if you want to deny your device being searched or at least to make it as difficult and as expensive as possible for your data to be extracted forensically.

Source - I'm a cybersecurity professional

Returning?

I noticed that often, when traveling, people from the U.S. will say the state they're from rather than the country. I've often wondered why.

I took Amtrak from NYC to Montreal last year for the eclipse, I had a great time.

Would have been technically faster to drive, but the flip side is that I didn't have to drive, and it was a beautiful ride. And once I was there I definitely didn't miss having a car, I found everything to be very walkable and the subway beat anything I've personally used in the US. If the weather is nice I'd probably also consider using their bike share.

Assuming you're doing the same train, just a heads up that Amtrak WiFi is practically useless. Make sure you have whatever you need downloaded before then because a lot of the way had spotty or no cell service. Bring a pen, you're gonna have to fill out a form at the border crossing and pens seemed to be in short supply on the train. The Canadian border agents when we went seemed like they were kind of dicks, but I think that's just kind of a feature of border crossing officials around the world. Coming back the American ones seemed a bit more chill but a lot has changed since last year. The food options on board aren't amazing so you'll probably want to pack some snacks, but they'll hold you over for the ride.

Some other unsolicited advice/highlights from my trip-

If you've got the wiggle room in your budget, au pied de cochon was hands-down the best meal I've ever had in my life. In general all the food I had there was amazing but I can't recommend that place enough.

The biodome, planetarium, and insectarium were really cool.

There was a store we stumbled into in the plateau- mycoboutique, that sold all kinds of mushroom stuff. Dried mushrooms, mushroom foods, mushroom growing stuff, various mushroom themed bric-a-brac. My wife and I are big mushroom eaters so we loved that. The stand-out though was an ice cream made from maple milky cap mushrooms. It contained no maple, just the mushrooms and it tasted just like you'd want a maple syrup ice cream to taste.

Take some time to explore the "underground city"/RESO, for the most part it just kind of feels like a shopping mall, but it's kind of amazing just how far you can get around in the city without setting foot outside.

The art museum seemed pretty cool, but unfortunately the day we tried to go someone had apparently called in a bomb threat so we didn't get to see that.

Poutine, smoked meat, bagels of course.

Everyone we ran into seemed to speak passable English, and no one seemed to give us any attitude about it. I can stumble my way through some basic French pleasantries with my half-remembered high school French, and people seemed to appreciate my token efforts, but it's probably not totally necessarily as a tourist.

I'm from Philadelphia, in general Montreal kind of felt a lot like the best parts of Philly if we cleaned up and got our shit together.

There's not many cities I've visited where I'm itching to go back, normally I'm more of a woods and camping kind of guy, but I would definitely go back to Montreal in a heartbeat.

I think it's worth keeping the doors open for tourists. Americans who have a good experience of visiting Canada, and who have met Canadians, may be less inclined to support invading. And it will be counterproductive to alienate the entire US population by turning hostile - this will only help Trump. Sure, a good number of Americans support Trump's fascism, but just as many do not. It will be helpful to maintain decent relations with those ones, and to have them on Canada's side if Trump escalates hostilities.