WALLS INSIDE WALLS

Perhaps the walls of security going up around Maine’s border are required to alert the state to how much it depends on a region that is not defined by state or national boundaries. But just as some Maine residents living along the border with Canada need to move freely and easily between the two countries to live their lives happily, this state must be able to see itself as connected to the larger region of the Northeast of the United States and eastern Canada. And, just as important, Washington and Ottawa must recognize this connection.

Instead what Maine has now was exemplified in a BDN news story recently: A father and son in Township 12 Range 17 living within a five-minute walk of the border are no longer allowed to cross there, for homeland-security reasons, and must drive 60 miles to the nearest approved crossing. Or, similarly, starting last month, food suppliers in Canada had to start sending paperwork to customs brokers in the United States ahead of their deliveries, so that a border station could be notified that they were coming. The same process applies going in the other direction, and has held up not only perishables but such basic services as the mail.

The mail delay apparently was resolved after a couple of weeks late this fall, but the larger question of security remains within a region that has many reasons to work together and very few to divide itself. Last spring, former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney told a University of Maine audience that, “Acting together, we protect our external borders. We protect our shared continent together. We protect our perimeter, but once inside, you should have the freedom to go from country to country. Rather than sealing our borders from each other, we should open them up and seal our perimeter.”

The perimeter is easy to identify – airports and ports – and focusing there not only helps people and business move easily between the two countries but changes perception about where Maine’s cultural and commercial connections really lie.

The United States and Canada likely can address immediate problems with the added security case by case, but that would be solving only the symptoms of a larger problem – that culture, trade and tradition define a region currently not described on a map. If it were, the hundred smaller problems in this and other instances would be much fewer.