A Letter from a Canadian Exiled from His Home in Taiwan

Dear Canadian Government Official in Ottawa,

I am not a lawyer. I am not a political figure. I am simply a Canadian whose life has been dismantled by a system I once trusted.

I first went to Taiwan at eighteen years old. I did not go there as a tourist. I went there to live. Fifteen years later, Taiwan was still my home. I built a business there. I built a community. I built relationships that mattered to me deeply. I believed in Taiwan as a place governed by fairness and the rule of law, and I made it my life.

What eventually destroyed that life did not begin as a legal dispute. It began as a frightening safety incident.

A heavy rolling metal gate at my residence failed shortly after I was told it had been repaired. It collapsed in a way that could easily have killed someone. Taiwanese national television covered the incident, and a doctor interviewed on air stated that gates of this type can weigh over a ton and can be fatal to anyone beneath them.

After this happened, I was left for weeks without a secure street-level door. My belongings were exposed. I did not feel safe in my own home.

Because I cannot read Chinese, I shared my rental agreement publicly in an attempt to demonstrate that the landlord was responsible for maintaining the gate. My intention was not to expose personal information. My intention was to restore basic safety.

When I was told to remove the document, I apologized immediately and took it down.

Four years later, I now find myself effectively exiled from Taiwan and facing a six-month jail sentence for “sharing personal information.”

At no point did the system meaningfully engage with the context: that I was trying to prevent a life-threatening hazard.

Throughout this ordeal I continued to believe that reason would prevail. Instead, I experienced a legal process where my explanation was treated with suspicion and where the power imbalance between a foreign resident and the local system became overwhelming.

I want Canadians to understand something that is very difficult to explain unless you have lived it.

There are more than 50,000 Canadians currently residing in Taiwan. Many of them believe they are protected by the same assumptions they would carry at home: that evidence is handled fairly, that safety concerns are treated seriously, and that foreigners are not systemically disadvantaged.

But when something goes wrong — a traffic accident, a rental dispute, a misunderstanding — the experience can be profoundly different for a foreigner. Situations that would normally be straightforward can become opaque, adversarial, and deeply destabilizing.

What happened to me was not a theoretical injustice. It was the slow dismantling of my life.

I have a godson in Taiwan. I helped raise him from birth. He is seven now, and I have already lost a full year of his life. I watch him grow through a screen. I was there for homework, birthdays, bedtime routines — the small daily acts that make a child feel safe. Now I am a voice on a phone in another time zone.

I also recently said goodbye to my partner of eight years as I drove him to the airport. Our life was built around Taiwan. Canada was never the plan.

I am not asking anyone to solve the impossible. I am asking for something far simpler:

That someone in Canada understands what this has done to a person.

That the experiences of Canadians abroad are not quietly dismissed when they are inconvenient or uncomfortable.

That the thousands of Canadians currently living in Taiwan are made aware that disputes involving safety, housing, or accidents can escalate into life-altering consequences.

My suffering is now measured in years. It should not be invisible.

More information and documentation can be found here:
https://rosscline.com/scam

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Sincerely,

Ross Cline 柯受恩
rosscline.com
New Brunswick, Canada
+1 (506) 321-8659
iLearn.tw
Taichung, Taiwan