Canada, U.S. got smart about border after 9/11, but not smart enough: critics

WASHINGTON — The frontier between Canada and the U.S. used to be known as the world’s longest “undefended” border — a misnomer that largely vanished in the chaos of Sept. 11, 2001.

Other myths cropped up in its place, however: that al-Qaida’s operatives crossed it to mount their brazen attacks on Washington and New York, for instance. Or that the shared management of the Canada-U.S. border was a shining example of bilateral harmony at work.

The COVID-19 pandemic made short work of the latter.

“Clearly, we are not on the same page” when it comes to how the border has been managed during the pandemic, said Laurie Trautman, director of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.

“The degree to which we’re moving in a tandem fashion on how we’re managing the border has completely gone out the window.”

In fact, Canada had little choice in the matter 20 years ago when the U.S., — suddenly finding itself on a war footing with no idea when the next attack might come — promptly grounded commercial air travel and slammed shut its borders.

“Immediately, Alert 1 status,” recalled Michael Kergin, who was Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. at the time. “Closed the border completely. Sealed it.”

As fate would have it, Kergin happened to be friendly with Andy Card, the White House chief of staff under George W. Bush who was not only secretary of transportation in the previous Bush administration, but spent the intervening years as a powerful auto-industry lobbyist.

Card — the man who famously whispered, “America is under attack” into the president’s ear — knew the likely repercussions of a shuttered border. Kergin knew his phone number.

“We then started a process to lessen the jamming at the border to get some initial things through so that customs people could start letting the trucks go through.”

Fate and Kergin’s Rolodex helped Canada not long after when another longtime acquaintance, former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, was tapped to head up the new Department of Homeland Security.

Kergin knew Ridge, and former industry minister John Manley had recently been promoted to the post of Foreign Affairs by then-prime minister Jean Chrétien

“They bonded well,” Kergin said. “Within about three months, we had a pretty good formula for mitigating the adverse reactions on the border.”

That formula would produce the Smart Border Declaration, a bilateral handshake that became the foundation for new high-tech clearance features to expedite travel while fortifying security.

The dedicated shipping lanes, trusted-traveller programs such as NEXUS and Global Entry and pre-screening systems for cargo are among today’s commonplace fixtures of moving between Canada and the U.S.

Two decades later, that cooperation is a big reason why essential workers, trade shipments and foreign students were allowed across the border during the pandemic, despite restrictions on vacations and crossborder shopping trips.

“It was easier to close down in the way they did in 2020 by virtue of the systems that have been put in place since 9/11,” said Roy Norton, a former senior diplomat who was an assistant deputy minister in the Ontario government at the time.

But the sense of mutual cooperation during the pandemic evaporated last month when Canada began allowing non-essential travel for fully vaccinated U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Other foreign nationals who have had a full course of a Health Canada-approved vaccine can enter starting Tuesday.

The U.S., however, has yet to reciprocate, citing the Delta variant of COVID-19 in extending its land-border restrictions until at least Sept. 21.

Grassroots campaigns by residents and businesses in communities close to the border have sprung up, clamouring in vain for the Biden administration to begin allowing non-essential travel at land crossings.

Non-essential travellers can enter the U.S. from Canada by air, in part because of rules and regulations imposed by airlines.

“In the U.S. right now, we have a situation where the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t want to deal with health data at the border, but the Centers for Disease Control is basically saying: ‘We can’t just let people in willy-nilly,’” Trautman said.

The solution, Trautman said, is some sort of permanent oversight presence within the government bureaucracy that would keep border issues at the forefront of U.S. policy decisions.

“To a certain extent, they’re just sort of falling to the bottom of the priority list.”