Northern Neighbor Snubbed

Canada is the stealth bomber of nations, flying pretty much undetected by American radar.

I’d bet good money--that’s U.S. dollars, not Canada’s sorry excuse for currency--that few Americans even know that on Sept. 11 a Korean Air 747 believed to have been hijacked landed in Northern Canada’s Yukon escorted by two no-nonsense U.S. military F-15s. The Mounties evacuated the airport, schools and most big buildings before discovering that the 747 cockpit alarm that alerted the American military to a possible hijacking had been mistakenly triggered.

This was only one of the more than 200 planes destined for the U.S. that were diverted on that horrible Tuesday to land at Canadian airports. Nearly 7,000 stranded passengers descended on the remote town of Gander, Newfoundland (population 10,000). They were put up in homes and meeting halls. Some were taken on boat cruises and forest hikes during their 48-hour unplanned stopover. The passengers on Delta Flight 15, which was diverted to Gander while en route from Frankfurt to Atlanta, were so grateful for the welcome, they spent the flight home arranging a scholarship fund for a deserving Newfoundland student. Some $14,000 was collected on the plane.

So, when President Bush spoke to Congress a couple of weeks ago and thanked several countries for their help, when he called Great Britain “America’s truest friend” and mentioned Canada not at all, Canadians were

“Were we snubbed?” wailed the next day’s Toronto Star newspaper. Not at all, explained Bush a few days later. Canada is considered a brother to the U.S., he said, and you don’t thank family.

But it felt a bit like Canada was the latest addition to that list of presidential brothers we don’t like to talk about. There’s Jimmy Carter’s Billy, who liked his beer. Bill Clinton’s Roger with the drug problem. And now Canada, haven for terrorists.

Or so I’ve read. The Washington Post informed me last month that Canada is “riddled with terrorists.” While I doubt the sweep of the claim, it’s clear that Canada has left the continent’s northern door too wide open in the past. The most recent person to exploit Canadian hospitality was Ahmed Ressam, the terrorist with the millennium Happy New Year bomb intended for Los Angeles International Airport. An Algerian living in Canada, Ressam was twice refused refugee status there and ordered deported. Yet he still managed to hang about and actually collected welfare in Montreal. He was nabbed carrying bomb-making materials by alert U.S. Customs officials at the border in Washington State and was convicted this spring in Los Angeles on nine counts of terrorism.

Cases like Ressam’s left Americans wondering if its polar bear on the roof, metaphorically speaking, was asleep. It’s a legitimate concern that was, unfortunately, misconstrued by some as a call to bar the gate into the U.S. from Canada. While this might prevent terrorists from entering America, it would leave them in Canada. As a Canadian, I find this prospect alarming.

The issue, surely, is not our common frontier. The two countries share one of the friendliest borders in the world, in part because they do about a billion dollars in trade each day, and much of it moves by truck. Crossing this frontier is neither as easy nor as quick as it was before last month’s attacks. But it is the wider, continental border known as the North American perimeter that needs a better gatekeeper.

Canada has always had a less restrictive immigration policy than the United States. Canadians are proud, sometimes to the point of smugness, of their nation’s reputation as a safe harbor for refugees. They recoil from scenes like the mobs of soon-to-be deported Haitians pressed up against the wire fence of detention centers in southern Florida. (Rather a lot of them, by the way, seem to end up later in Montreal driving cabs.) But this open-door policy was designed for a kinder, gentler world than the one we find ourselves in today.

Canada is at work on a new immigration bill, one that would tighten screening procedures for refugees and make it easier to deport undesirables. These changes alone will not bring Canada’s immigration and asylum policies into the more restrictive line employed in the U.S. But then, the stricter American rules are hardly fail-safe. Two of the September suicide hijackers turned up on an Immigration and Naturalization Service watch list only after they had already successfully entered the U.S. Others with mass murder on their minds are surely already here.

Canada’s prime minister, Jean Chretien, was ready to say as much publicly during his visit to the White House last month. But, being Canadian, his meeting with Bush wasn’t much of a news story in the U.S.

For all my disappointment at the dearth of Canadian news and opinion in the U.S., I have been pleasantly surprised at the number of Muslim voices I’m hearing and reading in American media. A tremendous store of reasoned, intelligent commentary from the Arab world is now in the news. I just wish that Americans, now making such an effort to know their presumed enemies, would show more interest in their friends.