Task force criticizes border policy
Former U.S., Canadian officials call inequity of restrictions “damaging”
The report of a binational task force on U.s.-canada pandemic border policy said Friday that the federal government eroded public trust due to its flawed handling of prolonged land border restrictions.
U.S. authorities failed, the report said, by seeming to ignore concerns from the public and Congress’ Northern Border Caucus on the impacts of border restrictions; by failing to produce a plan to reinstate crossings; and by refusing to coordinate with the Canadian government despite collaboration being a key tenet of the existing North American pandemic plan, last updated in 2012.
“The perception of injustice and inequity in the border restrictions was damaging,” the report stated.
The task force, composed of former elected officials, noted that the Northern Border Caucus members “were marginalized” when they spoke up, and the government held few public hearings under either the Trump or Biden administrations.
As an example, the report pointed to the “seeming indifference” of federal officials to the case of Point Roberts, Wash., a small peninsular slice of U.S. territory whose residents are connected by land only to British Columbia. Residents found themselves cut off from the 25mile land corridor through Canada required for them to enter the U.S.
The task force is composed of two former border-state governors, Christine Gregoire of Washington and James Douglas of Vermont, as well as two former deputy prime ministers of Canada. It was brought together by the Canada Institute of the Wilson Center, a U.S. policy think tank.
U.S. Rep. Brian Higgins, a New York Democrat who co-chairs the Northern Border Caucus with Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-schuylerville, agreed generally with the report’s conclusions. The caucus had been lobbying for more than 18 months before the U.S. government recently announced that both land borders would reopen for vaccinated visitors on Nov. 8.
“Right from the beginning, there was nobody really in charge at the White House. And there was nothing but conflicting information coming out of it,” said Higgins, who added that the pandemic border rules involved many different agencies.
“The conventional wisdom — just because we were all left to guess — was they didn’t want to open the U.S. border to Canadians without opening the U.S. border to Mexicans,” Higgins said. He noted the steep difference in vaccination rates between Mexico and Canada, but said that the prolonged closure even for vaccinated travelers was a “lost opportunity,” where border crossing could have been used early on to incentivize vaccination.
The members of the task force — which collected perspectives from experts, government officials and private citizens — said they understood the challenging nature of a pandemic.
“All four of us had a great deal of empathy for decision-makers in this process,” said Jean Charest, one of the Canadian members. “We were the first to recognize this wasn’t an easy situation, and one that called on them making difficult decisions and doing it in record time.”
But the legislators expressed hope that, in future crises, governments would shift their strategy to a riskbased approach to restricting border crossings rather than a near-total shutdown.
Both countries relied on categories like “essential” travel to determine who could cross the border since March 2020, even after vaccination efforts were underway. But when the border caused family separations, that definition became a point of contention.
“(The) bottom-line lesson of our experience is that we need to minimize uncertainty, we need to have consistency, predictability in these processes and these procedures,” Douglas noted in the report.
The former governor added that he thinks people have a right to know that border decisions are rational and risk-based, taking into consideration the types of frequent, crucial, low-risk crossings that occur in communities bifurcated by the northern border.
The report criticized Canadian officials for many of the same failings committed by their U.S. counterparts.