Well into the 1980s, the borderlands between Quebec and New York were known for the quaint, old-timey crime of cow-smuggling.
It was a more innocent age, when the frontier existed in most people’s minds as a legal fiction. Some buildings even straddled the international boundary, including one bar split between Dundee, Que., and Fort Covington, N.Y., called the Halfway House.
“There’s a border here, all right,” said its owner, Paul-Maurice Patenaude, at the time, “but it’s the most free border in the world.”
Today, the mood of this in-between region has changed. A two-way traffic of migrants between official points of entry has made human smuggling a bigger concern in recent years. This week president-elect Donald Trump posted on social media about a deluge of immigrants and drugs pouring in from his northern neighbour and promised to impose a 25-per-cent tariff on Canadian goods. Mr. Trump’s re-election has also aroused fears in Canada about a wave of asylum seekers fleeing his promised mass deportation of about 11 million undocumented residents.
Hélène Gravel lives on the Canadian side of the Quebec-New York border, not far from the formerly popular irregular crossing of Roxham Road. She often sees migrants trying to enter the U.S. on foot by walking through her property, and has already noticed more police in the area since Mr. Trump’s election. She was so horrified when the votes came in this fall that she had to go outside and chop wood.
“I took my chainsaw and worked in my forest for five hours – to forget,” she said.
Hélène Gravel, who lives in Hemmingford, Que., near the Roxham Road crossing into New York, often sees migrants trying to enter the U.S. on foot by walking through her property.Christinne Muschi/The Globe and Mail
The feeling of angst is mutual. In a McDonald’s on the other side of the border, Shawn Mercaldi wore a “Trump 2024: The Sequel” hat and spoke about his fears of uncontrolled immigration from Canada. “I do think there’s a problem with the border,” he said, gripping a paper to-go bag. “One American citizen getting killed by an illegal immigrant is way too much.”
The Canada-U.S. border is often described as the longest undefended border in the world, and it’s true. Nearly 9,000 kilometres from Alaska to Maine, Yukon to New Brunswick – and no invasions since the War of 1812.
But undefended does not mean at ease. In communities across the 49th parallel, heightened bilateral tensions have wormed their way into everyday life, just as they have forced politicians across the country to scramble for a response.
To policy makers and ordinary residents alike, it can feel like the typically slack and invisible thread between the two countries has been pulled tight as piano wire, gradually and then all at once.
Roxham Road, near Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que., on Nov. 28. Nearly 9,000 kilometres from Alaska to Maine, Yukon to New Brunswick, the Canada-U.S. border is often described as the longest undefended border in the world.Andrej Ivanov/The Globe and Mail
At the turn of the 20th century, it was America’s northern border that kept U.S. law enforcement up at night, not the southern border that has seized the lion’s share of attention in recent decades. Goods and people have flowed easily across the Canada-U.S. border as long as it has existed – sometimes too easily for American tastes.
Mr. Trump would have recognized the traffic in migrants and drugs between B.C. and Washington State at that time. Canada had more permissive immigration laws, prompting many Chinese nationals to seek residency in Canada before discreetly entering the U.S. by foot or boat, said Bradley Miller, associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia.
“One of the major themes of our immigration history is people stopping over in Canada en route to the United States.” It’s how the U.S. got many of its leading lights, from the movie mogul Louis B. Mayer (born in the Russian Empire, raised in Saint John) to the telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell (born in Scotland, with a stopover in Brantford, Ont.).
Opium smuggling from B.C. into Washington State was also common in the 1890s, as dealers manufactured the drug with raw ingredients shipped from China, added Prof. Miller, author of the book Borderline Crime: Fugitive Criminals and the Challenge of the Border, 1819-1914.
The trend of transporting contraband peaked when Canadian distillers smuggled millions of gallons of booze into Prohibition-era America, but the illegal shipment of even boring everyday goods across the border has been a permanent fact of life.
“For most of Canadian-American history, smuggling was omnipresent,” he said. “If New Brunswick has plaster and Maine doesn’t have plaster, people will smuggle plaster.”
The world’s longest international boundary was simply very hard to police, especially at a time of smaller government and more basic technology. The bootlegger-turned-Seagram whisky billionaire Samuel Bronfman rented a permanent sleeper compartment on the train from Montreal to New York just in case he needed it, Peter C. Newman writes in his history of the family – and no one stopped to check his passport at the border.
Only in recent decades – with the settling of the free-trade debates in the 1990s – did the boundary between the countries come to seem a placid ribbon of harmony, Prof. Miller said.
“That frictionless relationship, we’ve lived with it for so long that, before Trump, we’d forgotten that it’s an achievement, and a pretty recent achievement.”
Incoming U.S. "border czar" Tom Homan speaks to state troopers and national guardsmen at a facility on the U.S.-Mexico border on Nov. 26.Eric Gay/The Associated Press
The re-election of Mr. Trump put the shared border – and its security – right back at the top of the political agenda. The ribbon is suddenly easier to imagine as barbed wire.
Earlier this month Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s choice as “border czar,” threw down the gauntlet to Canada to get its act together, saying the Canadian government must enforce its immigration laws to stop people, including alleged terrorists, from slipping across the border illegally into the U.S.
In the broadcast interview, he said “tough conversations” were on the horizon.
Immigration Minister Marc Miller said in a press conference not long afterward that he was ready for a “tough conversation” and that there is “an alignment of interests” with the U.S. on wanting a secure border.
But not everyone was impressed by the government’s response. Quebec Premier François Legault said he didn’t believe Ottawa was doing enough to secure the shared frontier. He announced plans to mobilize the province’s police force to support the RCMP and conduct surveillance at the border.
The border was in the spotlight in Ottawa as well as Quebec City. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said on Thursday that Canada’s premiers were stepping in to tackle security at the border after the federal government abnegated responsibility for it.
“What we’re seeing now, though, is that because the Prime Minister has vacated the border and turned it open to anyone who wants to come in, the premiers are now taking responsibility for our border,” he said.
Last week Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Ottawa was preparing to pay for extra officers, vehicles and increased staffing to secure the border with the U.S.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Last week in the House Commons, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Ottawa was preparing to pay for extra officers and vehicles. The government would increase staffing and work with “counterparts all across the country” to secure the border, he said, but he did not provide details about how many extra officers would be paid for.
The once-sleepy borderline was further electrified on Monday with Mr. Trump’s announcement that when he takes office both Canada and Mexico will face 25-per-cent tariffs on their products until they take sufficient action on illegal crossings and drugs.
The move shocked the Trudeau government into more urgent action. The Prime Minister convened an emergency meeting Wednesday evening with provincial and territorial leaders. Soon afterward Ottawa announced plans to pump more money into Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and the RCMP in an apparent attempt to placate Mr. Trump.
Border agents, taking a rare star turn in the political drama, began demanding more than just money from the government. Mark Weber, national president of the Customs and Immigration Union that represents border officers, says the remit of his members should be expanded to allow for patrols of the huge land border with the U.S.
Responsibility for border security is divided between the RCMP and the CBSA, with the Mounties responsible for patrolling the rest of the land border between the country’s 1,200 regular ports of entry. Mr. Weber said the government only needs to update a “Prohibition-era” 1932 government order to extend their remit.
Migrants arrive at the unofficial border crossing point at Roxham Road in 2023, before the crossing was permanently closed. Responsibility for border security is divided between the RCMP and the CBSA, with the Mounties responsible for patrolling the rest of the land border.Roger Lemoyne/The Globe and Mail
“Now is the opportunity to remove that outdated 1932 order-in-council and allow us to do those patrols between ports of entry. We’re fully armed. We can do it tomorrow, if we were given a mandate to do it,” he said. “Believe it or not, if a customs officer sees someone crossing outside of the port of entry, we have to call the RCMP. We can’t even do anything about it.”
In the rush to find ways of taming Mr. Trump’s sudden fury about the Canadian border, experts are now calling for the revival of obscure and long-dormant bilateral bodies. Former public safety minister Marco Mendicino said one way to “send a very strong signal to the president-elect” is to immediately reconvene a meeting of the Canada-U.S. Cross-Border Crime Forum, which was revived after several years in abeyance last year.
The forum, composed of Canada’s public safety and justice ministers, and the U.S. secretary of homeland security and attorney-general, is a ready-made platform for sharing intelligence and addressing concerns about human and drug smuggling across the border.
“Being pro-active is crucial, because we want to transmit that we are in total alignment when it comes to shoring up the integrity of the border,” Mr. Mendicino said.
Vehicles enter the U.S. from Canada at the border crossing in Blaine, Wash. in November, 2024. On Monday Trump announced that both Canada and Mexico will face 25 per-cent tariffs on their products until they take sufficient action on illegal crossings and drugs.David Ryder/Getty Images
If Canadians often thought of their border with the U.S. as a kind of decorative ticker tape, the Trump administration appears to believe the border is more like a fishing net that is full of holes. And some of the numbers do suggest that our shared border is becoming more porous to migrants and drugs, as Mr. Trump alleged in his social media post.
Statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection show that roughly twice as many suspected terrorists have tried to cross from Canada into the U.S. as have from Mexico in recent years.
The data are deeply concerning for Americans in the post-9/11 era and should be taken seriously and investigated by Canadian officials, said Michael Barutciski, a York University professor of international affairs.
As recently as September, he pointed out, a Pakistani man living in the Toronto area was arrested near the border in Ormstown, Que., in September on allegations he was plotting an Islamic State-inspired mass shooting on a Jewish centre in New York. The man entered Canada on a student visa last year.
“It doesn’t look good,” said Prof. Barutciski. “It’s a very sensitive issue and they often turn to Canada as sort of a weak point and they’re paranoid about that and we can’t deny that once in a while we do give them reasons to be afraid.”
Former Conservative public safety minister Peter Van Loan thinks the fear of Canadian terror strikes in the U.S. is overblown and that the perception is worth combatting while the issue is front and centre. After all, the data on terrorists reflect those who tried to enter the country and were prevented from doing so.
“It has been a long running misunderstanding among Americans that Canada has been a source of terrorists,” he said. “None of the 9/11 terrorists came from Canada. I continually ran into American politicians who believe they did come in through Canada, and the fact is, they did not. So Canada has a bit of a public relations issue there.”
The border is certainly under growing strain from irregular migrants – although the perception that they are more likely to be criminals has been harshly scrutinized. A recent U.S. study found that undocumented immigrants in Texas, at least, had lower rates of violent crime than U.S.-born citizens.
Still, border agents tallied more than 23,000 arrests of people trying to enter the U.S. from Canada in the most recent fiscal year – up sharply from about 10,000 in the previous year and roughly 2,000 the year before that.
That is a dramatic increase, although it still marks a tiny share of the more than 1.5 million arrests made by U.S. Border Patrol last fiscal year, most of them along the country’s southern border.
Mr. Trump is on shakier ground with his claims about drugs flowing over his country’s northern border. The quantity of illegal Canadian drugs seized by U.S. border officials is declining and also dwarfed by those intercepted from Mexico. Data from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol show a dramatic drop in seizures of narcotics on the northern border. In 2022, 27,260 kilograms was seized. Last year, that fell to 5,260.
Although agents seized three times more fentanyl on the Canadian border in 2024 than two years ago, the total amount remained modest, at 19.5 kilograms. On the southwest border, agents seized nearly 10 tonnes of fentanyl last year – nearly 500 times more.
Canadian authorities also point out that they are working hard to stop dangerous narcotics from flowing over borders and hitting North American streets. To detect illicit drugs, the CBSA has established regional laboratories staffed by field chemists, as well as dog sniffer teams that can detect them. At ports of entry deemed the highest risk for detecting illicit drugs, the CBSA has also established 82 “safe examination areas.”
An opioid action plan developed by Canada and the United States prioritizes disrupting the trafficking of opioids and sharing information.
Leaders from Canada, U.S. and Mexico also established the Trilateral Fentanyl Committee at the North American Leaders Summit (NALS) in early 2023. Its priorities include expanding the prosecution of drug traffickers and dismantling criminal networks, targeting the supply of precursor chemicals and preventing cross-border trafficking.
“U.S. authorities count on us in the same way we count on them to share information and identify threats to our countries,” said Gabriel Brunet, press secretary to Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc. “It is a tried and tested partnership that has kept our countries safe for decades and one that we are constantly working to strengthen further.”
Along the 49th parallel, crossing the border has long been an integral part of life in Emerson, Man., which shares fire departments and health services with neighbouring Pembina, N.D.John Woods/The Associated Press
Politicians reacted viscerally to Mr. Trump’s tariff announcement this week, reflecting not only the economic stakes involved but also the historical and cultural ties that have made the border seem so benign. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who ran his family’s label business in Chicago for many years, said Mr. Trump’s comments were “like a family member stabbing you right in the heart.”
Nowhere is the border controversy more high-stakes, or more personal, than in the many communities lining the 49th parallel. Crossing the border has long been an integral part of life in Emerson, Man. The town became home to the country’s first land-based customs station in 1871 to protect and collect duties for trade with the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had been prone to violent raids.
That customs house still stands today, but almost everything else about the local economy has changed since then – all thanks to the border. More than a million people go through the Pembina-Emerson crossing every year, most of them truck drivers transporting goods. The area is situated conveniently adjacent to Manitoba’s agricultural belt and hosts several sites for freight railway inspections.
A kaleidoscope of licence plates is the norm in Emerson, where residents criss-cross the border on snowmobile trails in winter and share fire departments and health services with neighbouring Pembina, N.D., said Wayne Arseny, the Manitoba town’s former mayor.
But the region’s long-standing cross-border harmony has been threatened since Mr. Trump was first elected in 2016, driving many undocumented immigrants to make the treacherous journey to Canada. In December, 2016, two Ghanaian men walked along the sub-zero Red River on the Prairies, suffering such severe frostbite that their fingers had to be amputated. The next year, in May, another man from Ghana, 57, died of hypothermia as he attempted to enter Canada.
RCMP officers recovered the bodies of four unidentified Indian nationals in January, 2022, near the Canada-U.S. border outside of Emerson, Man. Investigators believe the family was part of a larger group trying to enter the U.S. illegally.JOHN WOODS/The Associated Press
Then, in early 2022, the gruesome case of a young Indian family who froze to death just a handful of kilometres away from Emerson became another stark reminder of the troubles along the border. The trial for that case concluded last month with a Minnesota jury deliberating for less than 90 minutes before convicting two men, Steve Shand from Florida, and Harshkumar Patel, a man from India arrested in Chicago.
The men were each found guilty on four counts related to bringing unauthorized people into the U.S., transporting them and profiting from it. Andrew Luger, the lawyer for Minnesota, says the proceedings “exposed the unthinkable cruelty of human smuggling and of those criminal organizations that value profit and greed over humanity.”
The cases have shone a harsh light on the border, but Mr. Arseny doesn’t think rare irregular crossings should precipitate a trade war that would be disastrous for the region. What about the mall in Grand Forks, N.D., that depends on shoppers from Manitoba? Or the casinos in Minnesota? The border is a source of pride and should remain that way, said the former customs officer.
“We like having our right foot in the U.S., left foot in Canada,” he added. “It’s the envy of the world. People just won’t be able to make it any other way.”