That's quite disingenuous... He was tasered and restrained because he had become unruly and destructive.
Certainly the situation could have (and should have) been handled better, and the RCMP should have only tasered him once, but to call it murder, and specifically to say it's because he didn't speak english, is a blatant falsehood.
Last I checked there was no (official) death penalty for chair-throwing. Call it institutional incompetence in de-escalation and maybe we can find some common ground.
But passing through the land crossing can be. I'm a Canadian citizen and I've gotten far worse treatment from Canadian officials than I have from US officials.
So they sent him through a different customs agent, who took a cell phone he voluntarily gave to them, and then let him go... Doesn't sound particularly awful.
Anyhow, they probably suspected he was going to work illegally in Canada (plenty of people come as visitors and work illegally), and wanted to make sure that those weren't his plans.
Edit - furthermore, having any sort of sensitive information on a cell phone is idiotic, since they are far from secure. It's not terribly difficult to hack any device with physical access - and it's not hard to simply lose your cell phone...
4 hours? Unless I misheard, he mentioned he waited in the queue for an hour, and then waited on the agent for half an hour.
If you've ever flown into Toronto when it's busy, you can spend longer waiting on the normal queue in customs... Is that detainment too?
I'm sure if he wanted, he could have gone back the other way. He didn't need to enter Canada. At no point in the podcast did he describe anything that could actually be called 'holding' or 'detainment'....
Alot of my friends did the oppostie. American employers pay higher wages for professional labour than those in Canada. Most americans travel to study in Canada. Canadian economy is quite conservative, maybe thats why it fared ok in last recession.
Unfortuately people are very risk averse here, and like many VCs(according to PG) they don't exactly understand the tech their investing in. I guess SV or the US in general have investor class that can take risks.
Personally for political reasons I will stay in Canada, but finding investors for my startup is going to be difficult.
Lucikly Intel will save the day for me.(fingers crossed).