Good fences don’t make good neighbors

Secretary Tom Ridge is in charge of the Department of Homeland Security and, it turns out, a fair chunk of Maine. He probably didn’t intend for that to happen because, having been governor of Pennsylvania, he would know enough not to want to run another state. But there’s no avoiding it: Maine not only has a long foreign border and a long coastline but a long dependence on Canada, and that’s where the secretary comes in.

Mainers and Canadians marry, work, shop, quarrel, pray, visit and vacation together. We exchange medical treatment – inexpensive prescription drugs for high-end procedures. Fire departments have mutual-aid agreements that cross the border. When the anti-tax group Club for Growth ran an ad to harass Sen. Olympia Snowe last year it likened her to – mon dieu! – the French, only to find a state full of people of French-Canadian descent who didn’t see it as a smear at all. Like several Maine cities, Bangor flies the Canadian flag right next to the American one at City Hall.

This cross-border conviviality is difficult to continue when the nation stands ready against terrorism and Maine is still figuring out the cultural shift that the heightened security demands. As a result, Secretary Ridge has a mailbox full of letters from the state’s congressional delegation.

“Whenever you have a remote border – and that’s true for most of Maine – the ties are strong because your sister community is the one across the border, not the one 50 miles away,” says Lynette Miller of the Maine Emergency Management Agency, which is the state’s Homeland Security. “The struggle up to this point has been to preserve that culture.” The struggle often shows up when business is at risk, but beneath the jobs and the movement of goods are assumptions about the way Mainers and eastern Canadians live together. Consider several stories from just the last couple of weeks.

For decades, Canadian nurses have worked at hospitals in northern and eastern Maine, but starting July 26 before they can return to their jobs they must first meet visa requirements and pass a national exam. That’s being done, but the pace of processing the applications may mean they won’t be approved by the deadline. The congressional delegation has written to the secretary on the topic and awaits his reply.

Homeland Security – DHS – also oversees immigration visas for temporary Canadian workers in the Maine woods. The loggers have traditionally gotten the visas but now cannot because this year DHS is actually enforcing the cap on them. This leaves 700 logging jobs in Northern Maine – jobs much closer to Canadian towns than Maine towns – unfilled and the prospect of sawlog and pulp shortages that could affect another 3,000 jobs in the state. Timber industry officials are hoping the secretary will quickly grant a temporary exemption for these workers because of the statewide benefit of such an exemption. They, and the letter-writing delegation, are awaiting his decision.

The Lewiston MAINEiacs, a Canadian junior hockey league team, received the benefit of renewed effort by the delegation recently to bring some of its Canadian players and coach back to Maine, something they’ve been trying to do for months. They fall under the same cap as the loggers – no final word yet from Secretary Ridge.

There’s plenty more. Canadian truckers trying to drive to Campobello Island, which they can do only by going through Maine. Maine residents who shop or attend church near a border crossing that closes early on Saturday and doesn’t open at all Sunday. A lobster hauler recently found that his Canadian-made boats would put him in violation of a maritime act unless he can prove his business is fisheries not transport. He awaits a ruling from a lawyer for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Service, a part of Homeland Security. In our work, health care, religion and recreation, the border has traditionally been low.

The separate events begin with the common agreement, if not always the practice, that Maine and Canada are culturally and economically integrated, an agreement that ended with the explosions of Sept. 11. From that attack came Homeland Security and from a demand for security came the ripples of a reordered culture, one less easy going and more suspicious. This may not be unique to Maine, but its strong French-Canadian ties, the fact that it borders just one state but two provinces and its common interests with eastern Canada make it unusual.

Protecting a culture that Maine values, says Ms. Miller, means “deciding what are the real requirements for security, and I don’t think that has been answered yet.” That is the pivotal question. How much more secure does Maine become by being a more protective place? It is worth asking because while the border is becoming firmer, the culture, in small ways, is softening, losing its definition. Ms. Miller says the state and federal governments will continue to work on an answer, that, “We don’t have the luxury of failure because the cultural relationship is so strong.”

Meanwhile, would it hurt Secretary Ridge to respond to some of those congressional letters? This is his state, after all.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.