Move Over Puerto Rico, There's a New 51st State in Town

It's bigger than Texas, colder than Alaska, and more polite than Massachusetts. And if plans to integrate U.S. and Canadian border security go ahead, it could be here sooner rather than later.

There are plans afoot to integrate U.S. and Canadian border control and create a giant North American perimeter encompassing both countries. In theory this is a good idea, says the Globe and Mail. The “thickening” of the border post-9-11 has resulted in the strangulation of U.S.-Canada trade, and there “would be no need to tighten the border if U.S. lawmakers could be assured that terrorists planning to slip into the U.S. via Canada could be stopped.” The Globe might be right, but does Washington need direct control over Canada’s borders to make sure no terrorists are slipping into the U.S. from here? Perhaps we could just remind them that we’ve already done a good job preventing that kind of thing?

The Montreal Gazette is skeptical about the plan, arguing that Canada has already harmonized our domestic security and travel policies to fit U.S. standards, and our trade has still been strangled. There is “little reason to think the U.S. will be anything less than its by-now usual paranoid self” under a North America-wide security agreement, the Gazette says. One could argue that in post-9-11 world the U.S. has every reason to be extremely vigilant, but the Gazette points to the recent case of Pakistani-born Canadian Javed Latif, who was put on a U.S. watchlist in 2003 and then removed from it two years later. Washington gave no reason for either decision.

The Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom says a North American perimeter is horrible idea, because not only would it mean allowing U.S. security forces — the guys behind Maher Arar’s deportation and Guantanamo Bay — to collect information on us, but we’d be tying ourselves closer to an economy that increasingly appears to be crumbling. Worst of all, Walkom says, we wouldn’t end up with the hassle-free border we covet because “no U.S. politician who wants to get re-elected would ever agree to weakening America’s northern border … So the upshot of any perimeter deal will be to give the U.S two borders — an outer one around North America and an inner one at the 49th parallel.” Hello, 51st state!