Canada and September 11: Impact and Response

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, and Chile and the Nazis, and the coauthor of Invisible and
Inaudible in Washington: American Policies To

September 11, 2001, affected Canadians as well as Americans. Many
Canadians died at the World Trade Center. Canadian civil aviation ground
to a halt as U.S.-bound aircraft made unscheduled landings in
Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the Yukon after the U.S. government
closed U.S. air space. For days Newfoundlanders extended hospitality to
stranded passengers. Traffic crossing the Canada–U.S. border slowed to
a trickle, an important factor given the importance of the U.S. market
to Canadian goods. Some Canadians found themselves stranded in the
United States, unable to fly home. President Bush provoked controversy
when he omitted Canada from his list of countries that had helped
America on September 11. In the aftermath of that infamous date, the
Canadian Armed Forces went to Afghanistan, where four soldiers were
killed by “friendly fire” from the U.S. Air Force and from where
Osama bin Laden threatened Canada.

Most of the contributors to Canada and September 11 are based in
Alberta. Valerie Fortney of the Calgary Herald happened to be in New
York that day and describes what she saw. Writers from the University of
Calgary and Shell Canada (based in Calgary) describe reactions in their
offices and corridors, including the impact on travel plans. Michael
Robinson of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum describes his concern because his
wife was supposed to fly that day from Logan Airport, the point of
origin for two of the four hijacked planes. Edmonton-based writer Myrna
Kostash was in the Balkans at the time, but describes her dismay on
returning to Canada and discovering a spirit of intolerance. She
mentions “the shame of our complicity with the U.S. decision to flout
the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war—we handed over Taliban and
al-Qaeda prisoners to the U.S. army rather than guarantee them
protection under the Convention.” Kostash laments that few Canadians
cared when the death toll of innocent Afghans exceeded the death toll of
September 11. Along with William Warden of the University of Calgary and
the Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui, Kostash found less diversity of
opinion among Canadians after that date. A Calgary Muslim, Karim-aly
Kassam, was more optimistic.

The book includes both comics and scholarly articles.