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rfmcdonaldAs Tim Gueguen noted, yesterday was the first day that Canadians needed to take passports in order to cross the American border. It's gotten quite a lot of coverage, not least because the way this post-9/11 measure has divided cities once functionally fused, like Ontario's Sarnia and Michigan's Port Huron as Patrick White observed in The Globe and Mail.
Never mind the situation facing Québec's Stanstead and Vermont's Derby Line, which actually form a functionally fused community, with the border line dividing houses. Some people have wondered whether people will need passports in order to get into their kitchens.
Since the vision of Canadian-American union advocated by journalist like John Ibbitson is very unlikely to come to pass, Canadians are going to have to get used to this. It makes me sad, it makes me need to update my passport, it makes me wish that the Schengen Accord was a transatlantic deal. Regardless, some people are reacting better to this new measure than others. Take the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne, a reserve which straddles the borders of Canada's Ontario and Québec and New York State in a very complicated arrangement that has facilitated an illegal cross-border trade in cigarettes and is immensely complicated by the Mohawks' claim to sovereignty. The arming of border guards is immensely controversial, so much so that it sparked massive protests.
Perhaps ironically, the crossing into Canada has been closed.
The Blackhawk helicopters thump past Mike Bradley's river-view apartment like clockwork. When he hears the first chopper, he knows it's 10 a.m. The second, at noon, means it's nearly time for lunch. “Every day,” says Mr. Bradley, mayor of Sarnia, Ont. “They're from the Coast Guard or the military, and they just patrol the river, up and down.”
Not long ago, he would gaze across the St. Clair River to a town barely discernible from his own. Sarnia and Port Huron, Mich., were sister cities, sharing much more than a stretch of border. Shoppers hopped the line freely. Cross-border sports rivalries formed. The renowned International Symphony Orchestra, both a source and a symbol of harmony, drew players and audiences from either side of the St. Clair. Like so many towns along the “world's longest undefended border,” they considered it a mere line on paper, a legalism laid every mile along the land in concrete obelisks.
Today, the symphony and the camaraderie are faltering as the United States adds a physical dimension to the mapmaker's stroke. Most obtrusive of all, Mr. Bradley says, are $20-million worth of Boeing surveillance towers going up across the water from his living room. “I'm so close in my apartment, they'll probably see me in my underwear drinking a beer,” the mayor says. “This is no longer the world's friendliest border. That just no longer exists.”
Back in Sarnia, Mayor Bradley is preparing for the worst, come June 1. The new rules stopping anyone without a passport, microchip-equipped driver's licence or frequent-crosser card apply to Americans as well as Canadians, a requirement he expects will impede the flow of U.S. traffic into his city.
“It will be devastating,” he says. “Not just for Sarnia, but for the whole country. The average American is not going to get a passport just to make the odd trip to Canada.”
[. . .]
Given that cross-border trade runs to half-a-trillion dollars a year – about $1.5-billion every day – Mr. Bradley's concerns are warranted. Canadian businesses that rely on the U.S. have yet to get over 9/11, when the American government closed the border crossings – and the economic spigots that nourish Canadian industry.
In their book The Impacts of 9/11 on Canada-U.S. Trade, authors Steve Globerman and Paul Storer, who both teach business at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., detail how Canadian exports would be 15 to 20 per cent higher now had the U.S. kept the border open that day. U.S. businesses have regained every penny of cross-border trade they lost; Canadian ones have not.
Never mind the situation facing Québec's Stanstead and Vermont's Derby Line, which actually form a functionally fused community, with the border line dividing houses. Some people have wondered whether people will need passports in order to get into their kitchens.
Since the vision of Canadian-American union advocated by journalist like John Ibbitson is very unlikely to come to pass, Canadians are going to have to get used to this. It makes me sad, it makes me need to update my passport, it makes me wish that the Schengen Accord was a transatlantic deal. Regardless, some people are reacting better to this new measure than others. Take the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne, a reserve which straddles the borders of Canada's Ontario and Québec and New York State in a very complicated arrangement that has facilitated an illegal cross-border trade in cigarettes and is immensely complicated by the Mohawks' claim to sovereignty. The arming of border guards is immensely controversial, so much so that it sparked massive protests.
Akwesasne Mohawks are once again being allowed to cross the Seaway International Bridge from Cornwall onto their territory, but the Canadian border post remains closed.
The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) shut down its post on the Mohawk territory that straddles Quebec, Ontario and the U.S. early Monday morning after Mohawk leaders warned they would not tolerate guns in their community.
The border guards were scheduled to start carrying 9-mm handguns Monday morning under a new federal policy.
'They're so nasty and harassing our people that we can almost feel ... their finger being itchy on the trigger,' said John Boots, a Mohawk from Akwesasne.
[. . .]
The Mohawk protesters are angry about guards being allowed to carry guns, because they say it violates their sovereignty, and increases the likelihood of violent confrontations.
The Mohawk protesters reportedly cheered when news of the border guards' departure became known.
"They're so nasty and harassing our people that we can almost feel ... their finger being itchy on the trigger," said John Boots, a Mohawk from Akwesasne.
But the CBSA points out U.S. guards working on the territory have carried guns for decades without any problems.
Perhaps ironically, the crossing into Canada has been closed.
