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

Book by Laxer James

Preface

I set out to write The Border in an age that has now passed -- the less fearful time prior to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001. I first conceived the book in the sunset days of the longest bull market in history, when the “new” tech-based economy still seemed to hold the promise that we would all become rich. For those who didn’t like the way the spoils and the power were being divvied up, there were demonstrations against globalization, the World Trade Organization, the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, the IMF and the World Bank to attend in places like Seattle, Washington, DC, Quebec City or Genoa.

Travelling across the continent to places where social issues play themselves out simply to watch people is a favourite activity of mine. My goal was to journey along the Canada -- U.S. border to observe communities on both sides, to consider the history of the border and to reflect on the Canadian-American relationship. Even in those halcyon times, it was clear that Canada was headed for a reckoning in its relationship with the United States. Free trade had taken Canada too far into an economic union with the U.S. for those who had won the free trade fight not to want to take the next steps toward full economic integration and possible political union.

One day early on in the project I drove down to Niagara-on-the-Lake, the picturesque old town located across the Niagara River from New York State, to think about the book. I sprawled on the grass in a big park that slopes to the shore of Lake Ontario. The cold waves were rolling ashore. As I sat in the bright, late May sun at midday, across the water I saw the skyline of Toronto -- the CN Tower a little off to the left and the big banks all in a clump. There was Canada’s biggest city, visible from U.S. territory. Off to my right, less than a kilometre away on the far side of the Niagara River, was Fort Niagara, the fort at Youngstown, New York. Niagara-on-the-Lake is only a few kilometres from Queenston Heights, where Sir Isaac Brock and his British and Canadian troops defeated American attackers in 1813.

The frontier, in question that day in 1813, has stood for over two centuries since the American Revolution. What does the border signify, I wanted to know. Is it merely a dividing line drawn by contending forces long ago that no longer matters? Or is it the boundary of a nation, with its own values and outlook, that can endure next door to a superpower?

Over a period of eighteen months, I travelled along the border, from Campobello, New Brunswick, in the east to Vancouver Island in the west. And I took a cruise ship north from Vancouver to the Alaska Panhandle for a look at the most mysterious of Canada’s frontiers with the United States, the one that held the key to the riches of the Klondike. I went by car, train, bus, ferry, cruise ship and air to the seven provinces that have land borders with the U.S. and to twelve of the thirteen states that border on Canada -- leaving only Idaho for another day.

Inevitably, my approach to the book changed after September 11. In the end I was afforded a unique perspective on the border before and after a date when the world changed. For North America, September 11 brought on a twin crisis, that of the role of the United States in the world, and that of Canada’s relationship with the United States. The Border addresses that twin crisis.
Introduction

We are near the Alberta -- Saskatchewan border en route to Saskatoon when I retire to my railway-car roomette and climb into the narrow bed. I push up the window shade and turn out the light. As I lie on my side and look out, the sky fills the picture from the top of my window to very near the bottom, where the shadows of trees erupt from the flat surface of the prairie. The sky is so luminous that the stubble of the prairie appears like the edge of a grainy film.

Feeling fine but saddled with a mild ear infection, and therefore unable to fly home from Edmonton to Toronto, I’m taking the train, something I haven’t done for many years.

The stars in the window are an indecipherable jumble to me. I regret that I haven’t studied the constellations so I can read the great hieroglyphic in the sky.

I drift off to sleep and awaken a while later. I look out the window again and this time see a hieroglyph I can read. The seven stars of the Big Dipper fill the frame. And looking up from the last star of the cup of the Dipper, I find the North Star. Now I can read the sky. We are heading due east.

Much later still, I wake up again and look out. The Dipper is on its side now -- its handle down toward the prairie and the cup high above, its last star pointing back to the North Star, which lies in the left of the frame. We have turned to the south.

At the corner of the frame, a glow is beginning to light the sky. The hard prairie is elemental, like the surface of an unknown planet, as the light that is stealing across it casts its darkness into stark relief. The Dipper and the pole star are fading as the light spills outward from the corner of the frame. The harsh surface of the planet is about to explode in light.

The stars in my window, some I can read and others I cannot, are a metaphor for my country. For all that humans have done here for thousands of years, Canada remains vast and inscrutable. Its largest cities and its arable land lie on the edge of one of the world’s great land masses, a half continent that is as alien to human concerns as any terrain on the planet. There are now more than 30 million of us living mostly in the southern extremity of this immense land. The land itself remains the first and last fact of Canadian existence.
From the Hardcover edition.