Canadians Too Dangerous To Cross Border Without Visas, According To Veteran U.S. Senator

A Commentary by Doug Draper

Just what the people of Southern Ontario and Western New York need while so many of our communities, on both sides of the border, continue to grapple with serious economic challenges, including some of the highest jobless rates on the continent – another high-profile political figure in the U.S., portraying our shared border as a greater national security risk than the one the U.S. shares with Mexico.

U.S. Senator and homeland security chair Joe Liberman

That’s what Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, chair of the U.S. Senate’s Homeland Security and one-time vice-presidential candidate, did at a Washington, D. C. media briefing this past February 1, just a few days before Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s White House visit with President Barack Obama to discuss (among other things) border security.

During the same week that Glenn Beck, the grand spokesperson for the right on the Fox broadcasting network, warned millions of his listeners that American is in danger of becoming an Islamic state, Lieberman warned (based on some U.S. government study the rest of us have not seen) that the Canada/U.S. border is providing “easy passage into America by extremists, terrorists and criminals whose purpose clearly is to harm the American people.”

Sounds pretty scary, doesn’t it? And here is Lieberman’s punch line that could, if it were implemented, cause even more economic troubles for border communities in our greater binational Niagara than they have already endured with the requirement for passports or enhanced driver licenses to cross the border in the wake of 9/11. Lieberman is using his pulpit as the senate’s grand pupa of homeland security to require all Canadians crossing the border to apply for visas.

Like I said, just what our border communities need at a time of economic struggles which, according to regional and county governments, business groups and others on both sides of the Niagara River, have been exacerbated to some degree by the requirement for passports any other forms of enhanced identification to cross the border.

One cannot help but wonder what planet Lieberman is speaking from when he warns his fellow Americans of all of the criminal and terrorist-like rabble crossing from Canada into his country. Is he talking about people from Canada who would possibly cross the border and run into a government building or school and kill and wound dozens of people, or shoot a U.S. congresswoman through the head and kill and wound more than a dozen other people who came to discuss their concerns with her during a recent public gathering? Is he talking about drug cartels and killing squads who will go so far as to behead a law-enforcement officer investigating the murder last fall of an American citizen vacationing across the border in Mexico?

Perhaps the chair of the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee ought to take the time to visit and talk to people in communities along the Mexican and Canadian borders before he throws ridiculous accusations at Canada for being an exporter of criminals and terrorists. Perhaps he ought to look inside his own country at the number of nut bars, with their easy-to-get arsenals of assault weapons, who get actively engaged in the rhetoric of some of his fellow political operatives who rile up frustrated or angry American citizens with talk of getting “armed and dangerous” or resorting to “First Amendment solutions,” or who place crosshairs over the districts of members of congress they don’t like.

Senator Lieberman, please show us proof that Canada is a venue for terrorism or for reckless and dangerous rhetoric like that justifies even more obstacles to the flow of people and commerce across our shared border.

Problem is that Lieberman’s comments may gain a good deal of mileage with millions of Americans who know little about Canada, and who take everything Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh as gospel, and who give their unquestioning support to Tea Party leaders who claim that American’s founding fathers ended slavery and have no idea that the U.S. has a trade agreement with Canada.

That is why Lieberman’s outburst has to be taken seriously by residents, businesses and regional, county, provincial, state and federal government representatives on both sides of our shared border. Indeed, it was similar kinds of myths spun by some in U.S. government and media, that some or all of the terrorists responsible for the infamous 9/11 attacks crossed the border from Canada, that helped fuel the call for all Canadians and Americans to show passports when crossing our shared border. That, despite the fact that none of those terrorists entered the U.S. from Canada and that all of them had passports, and that politicians and businesses, up to and including then-U.S. senator for New York, Hillary Clinton, warned that a passport requirement could hurt border businesses.

Fortunately, Canada’s Harper government has already spoken out publicly against this visa idea. It may also help that Hillary Clinton is now U.S. secretary of state and likely still remembers the noble-but-lost attempts she made as a senator to stop the former Bush administration from requiring passports at the border.

It might do well if regional and county leaders on both sides of our shared border spoke out against this misguided call for visas too.

Here is another editorial produced by Rex Murphy for CBC’s The National on this topic. You may click on it at  file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrator/Desktop/CBC%20News%20-%20The%20National%20-%20Rex%20Murphy%20-%20Fearing%20the%20Canadian%20Border.htm

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