This will be my last comment on this subject, as it appears to have derailed the topic, and I admit that the comment was unfair and painted the larger group with a broad brush.
I am not being critical of the way I was being treated. The entire time I was treated in a friendly, professional manner, as I would expect. I wasn't hassled, made to feel like a criminal, talked down to, or lectured. I was forthright with the fact that I had exceeded the limit by a mistake on my part, and was fully prepared to pay any duty, penalties, etc. that were owed. I understood and accepted that the inconvenience that I was experiencing was part of them doing the job.
Since moving to the US in 2001 I've travelled home to Canada at least once a year, and this was the only time I've had issues entering Canada.
Not so when entering the US, but that has more to say about the differences in attitudes from one country to the other.
The problem I had was that no one at that particular crossing was able to figure out a simple conversion. Something that they need to be able to do day in and day out. It's not like I was the first person to bring goods into Canada from the US which was marked in Imperial measures instead of Metric measures. I have a problem with not being able to do the job you are supposed to be trained to do. It's not like they were having difficulty with figuring out what classification the product fell under in the multiple listings for tobacco types, each with it's own tariff rate. It's not like it was a piece of equipment that could fall into one of a hundred different classifications. They were stumped with a simple conversion, something that they learned through out their entire academic career. They even tried to look it up on the office computer, and couldn't find the correct information.
