Why Can’t CANADA Have A Wall?

Jan 05, 2024

Some parts of the U.S.-Canadian border are guarded by petunias.

Other parts don’t even have that.

Further south, the Republicans are keen on building a wall between the US and Mexico. In fact, 60 House Republicans are planning a trip to Texas to prove that they know where the border is.

They will probably line up for the photo opp, like a wall. Maybe with letters on their T-shirts. Sixty Republicans should be able to spell “WALL”.

This does not upset me, Republicans can do what they want. As long as they stay out of the economy. And education. And reproductive policy, taxation, labor relations and immigration.

But I digress: back to their Wall.

I want to know why all this money and attention is going to a Wall with Mexico.

Why can’t Canada have a Wall?

Surely, as friends, we can overlook the cost aspect.

It would be a mere bagatelle for Republicans. Recent numbers from Texas about actual construction costs indicate that it costs $3-billion to build 135 miles of wall. For ease of arithmetic and to make this comprehensible to the rest of the world, let’s round that off in kilometers: 200 km. The border with Mexico stretches for 3,000 km.

It would cost $45-billion to build a complete wall across the border against Mexico.

I say “against Mexico” rather than “with Mexico”, because as soon as you put up a wall, you indicate that you are against someone. Like the Gaza Wall.

Not counting ongoing maintenance costs or personnel to guard the Wall. This is what it looks like.

$45-billion is about the amount spent on military aid to Ukraine. For which the US is buying the destruction of its foremost enemy in the world, at no cost to American lives and acknowledging that most of the money spent on Ukraine actually stays in the US. Defence company stocks have soared. Heckova deal.

Translate that into Canadian terms, and we are looking at a Wall stretching 8,900 km.

Some 1,300 of that distance is over water, counting the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. So call it 7,600 km over land, and 1,300 over water.

The 7,600 land-bound part of the Wall would cost $105-billion.

Then there is the 1,300 km along the water. Two-thirds of the US-Mexico border is also along water, but the Rio Grande isn’t much of a river, in comparison to the St. Lawrence. In fact, thanks to astute policy-making in dividing up the flow of water, the river is now mostly a dry bed.

The St. Lawrence is a serious river, with a discharge of more than 10,000 cubic meters every second.

Imagine a thousand of these box-volumes flowing by Every Second.

It’s not very helpful for this article but I used to live along the St. Lawrence and I thought it was a cool visual.

Anyway, it’s a serious ‘leak’ in the Canada-US Wall so it is worth plugging.

The part of the wall that goes across the Great Lakes will also be a bit of a poser, considering the storms, but maybe you can use floatation-grade concrete. OK, I made that up. But wood…

Or you could use ships. Chained together. At a rough cost of $1-million per ship, and assuming each ship can stretch for 100 meters, that would cost $10-million/km, or $13-billion for the water part of the Wall.

Make it a total Wall cost of $118-billion.

It would be cheaper (and faster!) to give each Canadian a Canadian Tire coupon for $500 if they promised not to emigrate to the US.

Being Canadian, you could trust that.

So perhaps you are beginning to suspect that this whole immigration riff has more to do with publicity than policy — that Republicans have no common sense. But I’m being redundant.

Sadly for the Republicans, polls show that immigration is a concern to 8% (eight percent) of Americans, so the Republicans have sure zeroed in on a winning issue with this lets-build-a-wall theme. Even if the Republicans extended their campaign to involve crime (immigration-as-a-crime) national exit polls have shown that crime is tied for last as a vote-driver, well behind both abortion and inflation as the main issues people said determined their votes.

This is the disadvantage of being a party that doesn’t care what the voters think.

All of the current Republican froth about crime is for nothing. But it dominated about a third of all recent Republican advertising in federal races. They filled commercial breaks were filled with “grainy footage”-style ads about murders, rapes, robberies, even beheadings, no matter the office.

Instead of being “tough on crime,” Republicans have been actually weak on crime. They opposed a gun control policy, even though polls showed “gun policy” to be as important as crime. They said nothing on the horrific school shootings. They voted against greater accountability for tax cheats. They never condemned Trump’s crimes for the storming of the Capitol and other illegal activities.

They raise the flag of fear and then have no solutions for it.

Now they want to bar immigrants.

Could this be a move to distract voters from the fact that the MAGA Republicans have run the least effective House of Representatives ever.

According to Navin Nayak, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) Action Fund: “They will not make any attempt to actually find common ground, or find common-sense solutions to problems.”

This pathetic performance contrasts with that of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who managed to pass both party-line priorities and bipartisan legislation — including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Respect for Marriage Act — with a similar-sized majority.

According to Heather Cox, “Since President Joe Biden took office, he and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have asked Congress for additional funding for Customs and Border Patrol officers and additional immigration courts, but despite Republicans’ own demand for such legislation, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) wrote to Biden in December demanding that he impose stricter immigration rules and build a border wall through executive action. Today, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) echoed the idea that Biden, not Congress, should deal with the border.

“Meanwhile, Emily Brooks and Rebecca Beitsch of The Hill reported today that about They are also preparing to impeach Mayorkas on the grounds that he has failed to meet the requirements of the Secure Fence Act, “which defines operational control of the border as a status in which not a single person or piece of contraband improperly enters the country.” As Brooks and Beitsch point out, “not a single secretary of Homeland Security has met that standard of perfection.” House Republicans plan to hold hearings on impeaching Mayorkas, but Homeland Security Committee chair Mark Green (R-TN) has suggested to the Fox News Channel that the articles of impeachment are already written.”

They are willing to rage against someone but not step forward and be accountable for doing anything.

Yes, there is a certain constituency in the US that would buy that BS.

But it won’t include immigrants, who are too busy working to give a thought to politics.

In the US immigrants are more likely to be employed than people born in the US, according to a recent study.

Maybe if a MAGAt was overlooked for a job by someone new to the country, whose grasp of the language was hesitant, and who did not have the connections of a native-born person, that person could conclude that there is something fundamentally wrong with their qualifications or their attitude or with the way they drooled on their tobacco pouch.

Life is cruel. If it weren’t for all those socialist programs, they would hive no income whatsoever.

“A U.S.-Canada border wall is nothing but political sloganeering by someone who knows nothing about the actual border,” said Laura Dawson, the Canadian-born executive director of the U.S.-based Future Borders Coalition.

She was talking about Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who exclaimed that “We’ve got to just skate to where the puck is going, not just where the puck is…Don’t just build the wall. Build both walls.”

Stealing a line from Canadian hockey star Wayne Gretzky to make his point was a bit much.

Speculation has it that he was talking about drug smuggling into the US, which takes place mostly along the southern order.

“Forty per cent of it is underwater, while the rest of it traverses some of the tallest mountain ranges on the continent in three different provinces,” Dawson noted. “No serious person would give serious consideration to building a border wall under such conditions.”

This brings up a fine point, often overlooked by Republicans: the Canada-US border includes a portion along the Alaska/Yukon frontier.

This portion is 2,400 km by itself.

It includes Mount Saint Elias, the second-highest mountain in both Canada and the United States.

It has an elevation of 5500 meters (18,000 feet).

Air begins to be noticeably thinner at an altitude of around 5,000 to 8,000 feet. So the mountain would need some serious gear for any border guards.

In February, a group of House Republicans launched the Northern Border Security Caucus in an effort to escalate the pressure on Democrats and President Joe Biden over the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Caucus co-chair Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) said that “At the southern border, you have to cross a river. At the northern border, you just have to take one step.”

Kelly’s ancestors are from Ireland.

With people like this in charge, we can despair of having a Wall built across the northern border.

The political debate in Washington lacks the necessary expertise and understanding of the unique challenges inherent in managing a border as long and challenging as the one between the U.S. and Canada.

Think of all the tourist jobs that will be lost when people have no wall to take pictures of.

No one walking the line of border-boats.

No media series on the Big Build, or Northern Wall Emergencies.

Or dramatic stories of heroic immigrants crossing the Rocky Mountain portion of the Wall, clinging to the cliffs.

It’s absolutely unfair that Mexico gets all this construction and Canada is ignored.

Because the part that the Republicans are missing with this frantic publicity about the Mexican wall, is that a wall across the southern border does NOTHING for American security regarding (say) drug smuggling, if you ignore the northern border. In this, Ramaswamy is right. He does not seem to realize, however, that this point makes the entire southern wall campaign an idiot’s dream.

You can’t defend the northern border with a wall. There aren’t enough ships, or concrete, or mountain gear.

If a bunch of mafia gangsters in the 1920s could move barrels of booze into the US from Canada through a tiny well-guarded portion of that border, the prospects for security-via-a-wall are dim.

Canada is America’s biggest trading partner and oldest friend. You’d think we would deserve better.

Some Canadians, of course, got the idea totally wrong. Said one:

“As a Canadian, living on Vancouver Island, I would like to warmly welcome Americans escaping northward. Hurry now before the wall is completed. I have some spare touques to hand out if you don’t have one on arrival — just let me know when you get here.”

He’s ready to welcome American escapees. He’s got it totally backwards but his heart is in the right place. So Canadian.

Maybe we shouldn’t rush at this Wall idea.

Of course, we might be petitioning for a Wall if Trump wins…

To be honest, Republicans have no cause in demonizing Mexicans or Canadians or Central Americans. There is no reason to be afraid of immigrants. And there is no crisis at either border. The number of Mexicans living in the U.S. without legal status has decreased by more than a million people since 2007, according to Pew Research.

But that’s a fact, and so you won’t find it in any Republican material.

They are too busy right now pretending that Trump won the last election.

Mental denial: now THAT’s a wall they should work on…