In the hamlet of Stanstead, Quebec, a painted line runs across the floor of the local library. Sit on one side and you're in Canada. On the other side, you're in the United States. That line runs 8,891km across the continent and between Alaska and the Yukon Territory. Americans and Canadians like to call it the longest undefended border in the world.
In fact, it isn't quite undefended - although long stretches of it do slice through wilderness areas, down the middle of a river, over mountains and through empty prairie. Smugglers of people and contraband tend to favour those sorts of places for their crossings. But most pedestrian and vehicular traffic is funnelled into half a dozen highway bottlenecks that serve as major border crossings. Some 30 million passenger cars and another 6.7 million trucks head into the US from Canada every year.
The traffic north is equally impressive. In May, some 1.2 million Americans crossed into Canada for excursions that lasted less than a full day. Add those taking longer trips or travelling by aircraft, boat and ferry, and you begin to get a sense of the scale of the movements between the two nations.
You can imagine, then, how disruptive the US Department of Homeland Security's new rules about travel documents is going to be for merchants on both sides of the border who depend on that traffic for their livelihoods. Beginning on December 31, this year, all air or sea travellers entering the US from Canada will need, for the first time, either a passport or some other secure form of identification. Currently you can cross with only a driver's licence or a birth certificate. And on December 31, next year, people crossing by car will also need passports.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other Canadian officials have been lobbying hard for the US government to make an exception for Canadians, but they aren't making any headway. Just the reverse, in fact. Last week, the US administration proposed new rules that mean the 200,000 Canadians who live and work in the US will be fingerprinted and photographed the next time they cross the border.
Canadian officials might be concerned about the minor inconveniences that their countrymen will endure when they next cross into the US. But, in the end, their real concern is not Canadians: it's Americans.