North Americans First

It’s quite a conundrum: we’re proud Canadians who must now begin to think of ourselves first as North Americans. We have no choice. Not after a bunch of politico/religious zealots cloaked in the dignity of faith attacked the United States in the most dramatic way imaginable.

There are obvious implications for trucking in aftermath of Sept. 11, Canadian trucking in particular, and they’re not pleasant if we fail to form a truly cohesive North America with our embattled friends below the 49th.

For generations we’ve lived comfortably as a distinct society on the northern side of an essentially porous border. We feel smugly superior to our southern neighbors because, for lack of a better example, our murder rates are tiny in comparison. Yet we feel meekly inferior because, well, we’re tiny in comparison. To the plumber in Pittsburgh or any other ordinary working stiff, Canada is mostly invisible.

So be it. We’re used to it, if not altogether pleased by it. Aside from feeling insulted every time I prepare to board a flight to the U.S. and suffer a third-degree grilling by an immigration officer who sees me as a dangerous foreigner when I see myself as his friend, I can deal with this. In fact, the growth of free trade in the last decade had given me hope that a more pragmatic approach to our relationship with the United States would take hold. We’d been preparing a story for this issue that offered an example of exactly that pragmatism in terms of border policy.

Things have changed, and they’ve changed forever.

When those airplanes became missiles and found their targets, they breached not only U.S. security but ours, too. It’s becoming clear to everyone that we’ve been living on borrowed time with respect to terrorism. Now that the truth is known and accepted by all and sundry-who could argue?-big changes are in the offing.

What happened Sept. 11 was not an event; it was a watershed moment.

So, the border. I worry about the future of free trade now, and it’s still not clear that the North American Free Trade Agreement will survive this. Some may ridicule such an idea (while others mock the “free” word in there anyway), but it’s obvious that not all of our southern neighbors see open trade with Canada as a good thing. Or even an important thing.

And to the extent that free trade demands a border that is easy to cross, to Americans it represents a risk of infiltration from the north. Always did, but now it matters. Now we’re on the radar screen.

The North American business landscape has changed enormously since 1988 when the first free-trade deal was inked, and the benefit to Canada and Canadian truck fleets has been substantial. We can’t do without it.

The risk to free trade is that the benefits to the U.S. are not seen in such a favorable light down there, if they’re seen at all. Which leaves the balance in favor of a tight border in the minds of our Pennsylvania plumber-and his congressman. If it routinely takes 10 hours, or even two, for a truck and its trailer to get across at Coutts or Windsor or St. Stephen, then the efficiency of free trade is lost.

The automotive industry is probably the factor that will win the day for open trade. It dominates the continental economy, and certainly cross-border trucking in Ontario and Quebec, in such a huge way that its influence may be enough to douse the flames of a very forgivable paranoia at dozens of crossings. Let’s hope.

Regardless, nothing will save NAFTA if Canadians don’t step up our own security efforts and make major changes to immigration policies and practices to match the rigor of those in the U.S. I have always been 110% in favor of accepting people from foreign lands with open arms. They make us richer and help us grow. Our liberal ways, however, now represent a risk to both ourselves and the U.S. So free trade will not survive unless we form a common North American front on this issue.

I’m not for a second suggesting we have to give up our sovereignty. Just that we have to be tougher, a lot tougher. Remember, we’re Americans, too.