Protecting Our Right to Buy Cheap Crap in Buffalo

A plan to integrate Canadian and U.S. customs and make it easier to cross the border is in the works, but can it survive Canada's inferiority complex?

“Concerns about Canadian sovereignty, freedom, and privacy have largely been brushed aside in the scramble to placate American policy-makers who are obsessed with ‘hardening’ a border they wrongly perceive as dangerously porous,” declares a Toronto Star editorial today. The paper’s editors are hard to please: they’re upset about how difficult it is to cross the border these days, but they’re also upset at plans to make it easier. Ottawa and Washington are in talks to create an integrated North America-wide border system that would streamline border crossing in exchange for increased surveillance. Like critics of NAFTA and NORAD, the Star is worried that any kind of North American border system could lead to a loss of Canadian sovereignty, and demands that before any deal is signed the prime minister consult Parliament: “Canadians deserve some assurance that Ottawa isn’t giving away too much for too little. Harper should let us in on the details.” The Star shouldn't worry. If there's one thing this prime minister loves, it's taking things to Parliament, right?

It’s those kind of sovereignty concerns that the Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson predicts will quash a joint U.S.-Canada border deal, and he says that’s a bad thing. He’s a proponent of the Big Bang border theory (a pretty odd name for a strategy to keep out terrorists) which “envisions a fully integrated North American security perimeter and a fully integrated North American economic sphere that would include a customs union and labour mobility agreement.” Current negotiations won’t result in a deal like that, Ibbitson says, because “[t]oo many Canadians are reflexively suspicious of what they see as American encroachment on this country’s sovereignty.” He says that as a result there will only be incremental border reforms, and Canadians trying to get to Buffalo to buy a pair of Levis will remain snarled at the border. The wisdom of Ibbitson’s Big Bang theory notwithstanding, he seems oddly unsympathetic to Canadians who think that partially ceding control of our border to a more powerful, security-fixated country would be more than just a symbolic loss of sovereignty.