The Canadians Are Coming! The Canadians Are Coming!

U.S. border security and the existential threat that isn't.

Oh Chris Selley. How The Mark Newsroom loves your gruff wit. The National Post columnist’s latest target is U.S. politicians who think the undefended U.S.-Canadian border poses some kind of existential threat to America. “It’s good that Joe Lieberman is retiring. There seems to be something wrong with his brain,” Selley writes. The Connecticut senator recently floated the idea that Canadians should require visas to enter the U.S., which Selley thinks is supremely stupid. If there’s any threat to the U.S., Selley believes it comes from America’s eternally-squabbling security agencies, which often don’t share information with each other and can’t decide whose jurisdiction is whose. “Anyone who’s read the 9/11 Commission Report will recognize this rancid soup of incompetence, bickering, turf-protection and willful ignorance of the big picture. It’s frightening.”

Writing in the Globe and Mail, Canadian manufacturing representatives Jason Myers and Mark Nantais make the case for integrating Canada-U.S. border control, which is the topic of Friday's meeting between Stephen Harper and Barack Obama. “North American manufacturers don’t simply trade with each other; they also build things together,” they write. “In the manufacturing life cycle of a car … production parts can cross the border as many as six times … Each crossing requires a series of regulatory compliance and security checks, which adds time, raises production costs, decreases profits and increases consumer prices.” Surely those costs need to be reduced, but Myers and Nantais don’t weigh in on the privacy and sovereignty concerns that many believe will accompany border integration.

While the Vancouver Sun’s Barbara Yaffe thinks Harper will have a tough time negotiating with Obama about the border today, Sun Media’s L. Ian MacDonald says it should be smooth sailing because the two leaders “have developed a comfort level beyond their brief.” MacDonald says the pair are roughly the same age, both “analytical and emotionally detached,” have already cooperated on Afghanistan and the auto bailout, and heck, Obama called Harper his “friend at partner” during the G20. To which we’d ask, how was he supposed to describe Harper? “The man with whom I find it politically expedient to work until such time as another man takes his place”?