Canada-U.S. Border: Who Has The Real Security Concern?

By contrast, how many Canadians have been killed by the use of guns smuggled into Canada from the US, directly as a result of their lax control of firearms? How many Canadians have died as a result of constraints on our tobacco control policies that stem from the potential for smuggling of tobacco from the US into Canada? How exposed are Canadians to drug-resistant bacteria because the US refuses to have adequate public health care for its poor? How many Canadians have been unjustly imprisoned and tortured as a result of US border control policies?

The list could go on, but these few examples suffice to make the point. It is we who have the real security concerns as a result of our joint border, not they.

We need to be more rigorous in our policies to counter terrorism, for our own purposes. Indeed, the victims of the Air India bombing have justifiable complaints about our public security policies. On balance, the Americans do not. Quite the contrary.

If, as the current Deputy Prime Minister claimed when she assumed her new post, it is a primary duty of our government to ensure our security, it should act forcefully, beginning immediately, to change our weak strategic situation vis a vis the Americans, undoing the damage of the disastrous continentalist policies of the last 20 years, so that we can insulate ourselves better from the adverse effects of US policy adn actions, and join with other countries in a campaign to force the US to change the range of policies that make the globe less secure.

We need to be more professional and strategic in our management of our relationship with our neighbours to the south, not with the goal of making the their leaders happier with us, but with the goal of making their actions less important to our well-being. If we are to have a Cabinet committee to manage this relationship, its mandate should be to make its own existence unnecessary as soon as possible.

- David Laughton