Striking the delicate balance between security and free trade in a post-Sept. 11, 2001, world will be among the more pressing topics at this weekend’s conference of New England governors and eastern Canadian premiers.

“We’ve made an awful lot of progress,” Michael Kergin, the Canadian ambassador to the United States, said in a Thursday morning telephone interview on the efforts of both governments to provide quicker passage for goods and, to a lesser extent, people amid heightened security along the 7,065-mile U.S.-Canadian border.

Much of the efficiencies have come through technology, Kergin said, citing electronic recognition systems at 15 of the busiest border crossings. At those crossings, many of which are in Washington, New York and Michigan, frequent travelers who undergo background checks use a dedicated lane to pass through security with little delay.

“It’s certainly much better than getting caught up in a logjam at the border for a few hours,” said Kergin, adding that officials were scheduled to expand the system to two Maine crossings, Houlton and Calais, in the next several months.

The 28th annual conference, which runs from Sept. 7 to 9 in Groton, Conn., will bring together the six New England governors, only one of whom is an incumbent, and the premiers of New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Quebec.

Gov. John Baldacci said Thursday that beyond an opportunity to forge face-to-face alliances with the eastern premiers, he hoped to improve the state’s trading prospects with the region, a pipeline to the European market.

“The more we can eliminate the trade barrier, the more it benefits both our economies,” Baldacci said.

With the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, the predecessor to the better known North American Free Trade Agreement, now more than a decade old, U.S. and Canadian trucks are crossing the border at a record pace. In the past decade, truck traffic into Calais, the seventh-busiest truck crossing, more than doubled in the past 10 years from roughly 70,000 to 150,000 per year, according to state officials.

Those numbers demonstrate that the time for improvements at crowded Maine crossings is at hand, said Greg Nadeau, director of the Maine Department of Transportation’s Office of Policy and Communications, who will present a report on trade and globalization at the conference.

“You’ve got highways being used for rolling warehouses, adding to the congestion on the roadways,” said Nadeau, citing the relatively new trend among businesses to have more of their freight on the road to more efficiently replace inventories at manufacturing and retail points. “Clearly, we also need to be more efficient.”

Although the expensive electronic identification systems at the border have reduced delays for some freight traffic, Canadian business interests have argued that a better use of resources would be strengthening the perimeter border around both countries by negotiating similar policies on immigration, visa and travel.

Supporters say it would reduce the need for traffic slowing checkpoints between two of the world’s most prolific trading partners.

While trade is a perennial topic at the conference, the exchange of energy also is expected to be among the more pressing topics this year in the wake of last month’s blackout that crippled much of the Northeast and Canada.