The town that should rightly be Canadian
Sits mostly above cutoff 49th parallel
It was on Sept. 11, 2001, of all days, that a Washington State courtroom convened to hear one of the state’s most outlandish attempts to evade a drug charge.
Five years before, a trio of friends had been arrested in the border town of Sumas, Wash., af t er t hey were caught with a stolen credit card and a small amount of drugs.
But in front of the Supreme Court of Washington — and under a sky eerily cleared of airliners — their lawyer solemnly argued that Sumas was a lawless Wild West that wasn’t actually part of Washington.
And indeed, it shouldn’t have been.
To this day, a large chunk of the 1,300- person town sits atop ground north of the 49th parallel that should rightly have been Canadian soil.
“It wouldn’t matter to me if it went to Canada or the United States … I could go either side,” Sumas Mayor Robert Bromley told the National Post by phone.
Like many in the town, Bromley is the product of a cross- border romance, and thus has dual citizenship.
He’s also the owner of Bromley’s Market IGA, a large grocery store located in the town’s “Canada strip” — a stretch of land between the 49th parallel and the wrongly surveyed border.
Comprising anything north of Garfield Street, it includes a gas station, a small commercial district, a handful of farms and about 100 homes. The whole thing would easily be worth between $ 50 million and $ 100 million if it was part of Abbotsford, B.C., the Canadian municipality just across the border.
The f aulty border, i nc i dentall y, also makes Bromley’s IGA the most northerly non- Alaskan grocery store in the United States.
Since the signing of the 1846 Oregon Treaty, the Pacific Northwest has been divided at the 49th parallel.
But problems quickly arose when British and American officials started dispatching bearded surveyors into the forest to figure out where the parallel actually was.
After perilous expeditions through the rocky mountains, U. S. and Canadian teams kept turning up different results. More often than not, they simply ended up splitting the difference.
The bizarre result is that, more than 150 years later, Canada and t he United States employs a boundary commission tasked with maintaining an official border that rarely follows the true 49th parallel.
A 1998 Postmedia investigation of official maps found the border veers wildly in some places.
Just outside Coutts, Alta., for instance, the official Canadian border swerves 363 metres into land that should be U.S. territory.
“There is no interest on the part of the commission in revisiting treaties that have served both countries quite well,” the U. S. deputy boundary commissioner said at the time.
When all the discrepancies are averaged out, Canada comes out ahead. Between Tsawwassen, B.C., and Lake of the Woods, Canada has an extra 67.2 square kilometres south of the 49th parallel.
Still, most of Canada’s gains are in lightly populated grain country. Sumas can still lay claim to a chunk of land that would have otherwise been in the obscenely valuable British Columbia Lower Mainland.
As of press time, a four bedroom Abbotsford home within sight of Sumas was listed for $690,000. A brandnew four-bedroom in Sumas’ “Canada strip ,” on the other hand, was going for $393,000 CDN.
In 2001, the defence’s case before the Washington supreme court was that while the U.S. and Canada might have been fine with a wonky border, t he Washington State constitution explicitly defined its northern boundary as the “forty-ninth parallel of north latitude.”
Thus, while the north end of Sumas was still U. S. territory, the defence argued it was a weird federal noman’s-land outside the reach of any mere Washington State Patrol officer.
“When that was all happening … (we thought) ‘Well, can the State of Washington charge us taxes?’” said Bromley.
But after a hearing that saw lawyers parse through binders full of 19th- century survey reports, the state supreme court ultimately ruled that the ambiguity was due to a clerical error. In short, judges determined that Washington State’s 1889 founders obviously did not intend to inaugurate northern Sumas as a lawless strip of orphaned federal territory. But one judge dissented. In a passionate dissent calling the decision a “category mistake of galactic magnitude,” Justice Richard B. Sanders wrote that if his colleagues could not agree that the Washington State border is wrong, then nothing is wrong.
“The 49th parallel can be located to the decimal. It is precise as logic. It is as pointed as the needle on a compass,” he wrote.
“If that term is ambiguous, the language of law is no more than sand shaped into castles at the arbitrary whim of he (or she) who wears the black gown.”