The Semi-permeable Border

The morning of 911 Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister was on an international flight when the Captain called him to the cockpit to tell him of the hits against the towers in New York.

“My first reaction was, ‘My God, I hope they didn’t come in to the US through Canada’,” John Manley admitted later in an interview.

Following the attacks, rumors of terrorists entering via Canada appeared in US media. Even after these were disproved, allegations persisted the Canadian border was “soft” and this became a basis of calls for an enhanced North American Security Perimeter.

Privately, security figures will admit a porous Canadian-American border serves them well. Because of information sharing between the countries, it is easier to track a security risk who lives in Canada or enters the US from Canada than if they came from elsewhere.

Although citizens of both countries complain from time to time of some who cross the border from the other, a semi-permeable boundary has served both countries historically. Three waves of border crossings bear this out.

The first was at the birth of the US as an independent state. Canada was still a British possession. Estimates of American public opinion at the time of the Resolution have approximately one third supporting, one third opposed and a third undecided.

A large number of those opposed to the Revolution came to Canada as refugees, giving Canada its first major English speaking population. Though a British colony since 1763, Canada’s population and heritage till then had been French: part of New France that stretched from the Saint Lawrence to the Great Lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi.

The wave of refugees from the US Revolution changed that. It laid the basis of Canada as a bilingual country, and spared the newly independent United States a major problem.

Most revolutions since then have been followed by internal bloodshed and settling scores. The French Revolution was followed by the Terror. The Russian Revolution by civil war.

Having Canada next door to take in those who found themselves on the losing side of the Revolution gave the United States a cleaner start that would otherwise have been the case.

Another cross-border wave occurred preceding and during the US Civil War, when many runaway slaves came to Canada and a number chose to remain here to live.

A third wave took place during the Vietnam War. Draft-dodgers and deserters came north in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. A number took out Canadian citizenship, married and raised families here. They are spread throughout Canada, with many on the Pacific coast.

Due to the effects of the draft and media coverage, Vietnam became highly divisive in the US. It led President Lyndon Johnson to decide not to contest the 1968 election, and hounded the presidency of Richard Nixon.

A high water mark of anti-war protest occurred after the 1970 Kent State shootings. In a demonstration at Kent State University, four students were killed and nine wounded by fire from the Ohio National Guard.

Having had Canada as a safety valve for American draft dodgers may have saved the US from more violet incidents like Kent State.