The Border: Canada, the US and Dispatches from the 49th Parallel

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

James Laxer thinks that the border between Canada and the United States
is a good thing. From the start, he implies that the closer it
approximates a cordon sanitaire, the better.

Professor Laxer knows his historiography. Chapter 2 offers a concise
appreciation of the two schools of thought on the border as line and
symbol. One school insists that we are all North Americans; the other
maintains that Canadians are a separate people distinguished by
geography, European connections, and political culture, and obliged on
those grounds to resist every American expression of manifest destiny.
For the next few chapters, as he as he takes us on a tourist’s romp
from Campobello to Point Roberts, Laxer serves up superficial
observations and some glaring errors: he fails to realize that the large
industrial complex to the east of the International Bridge at Sault Ste.
Marie, Ontario, is a paper rather than a lumber mill; places Wawa some
200 kilometres from Lake Superior; and rearranges geography itself at
Duluth, Minnesota. Following this, he surveys the experiences of those
from each side of the border who have found refuge in the other country
(Canada, of course, is more often on the side of the angels and the
politically correct). Next, he surveys various kinds of smuggling, the
Red River floods, the implications of divergent foreign policies for
border policy, and the perennial question concerning the nature of our
interests and the extent to which our identities should be merged.

Every generation or two, aggressive American deportment affords our
Canadian Jeremiahs a reason to sound the trumpets. In the 1970s, they
wrote about the assault of the New Romans on Canada’s Peaceable
Kingdom, and the campaign to make us their economic serfs by buying up
our companies. Now they fear that our values will be subverted by
co-optation in a crusade, ignited by the attacks of September 11, to
impose American libertarian standards on the world at large. This book
is a good example of the genre and suitable reading for those interested
in the debate over Canada–U.S. relations.