IN DIVIDED TOWNS, SPLITTING HEADACHES

Post columnist Don Martin travelled the Canada-U.S. border from east to
west to explore the state of relations between the two countries. Today, in
the second of a five-part series, he faces arrest in Vermont and looks for
smugglers in eastern Ontario.

VAN BUREN, Me. - The use of hard labour to obtain dual citizenship was born
in the farm and forestry communities that link Maine to New Brunswick and
Quebec.

A new arrival's country of birth was usually determined by which side of
the border had the nearest hospital.

Ironic case in point: Mark Albert. Born in Montmagny, Que., he returned to
Maine as a bouncing four-day-old baby. He now holds dual citizenship and
makes a living as supervisor of the U.S. Border Patrol office in Van Buren.

"Before socialized medicine, a woman in labour went to the nearest hospital
and didn't really care if it was Canadian or American," he says. Not that
you can really blame them.

Albert's job now is to make sure there is a very distinct line protecting
his 200-kilometre stretch of potato-fielded border from what was, very
briefly, his home and native land.

"Nothing's changed in law, but 9/11 forced people to realize they're
crossing a border. I guess my job is to remind them."

Nobody knows that better than the residents at my next pit stop.

Day Four - Pohenegamook, Que

Alfred Sirois, an 82-year-old French-Canadian who owns a general store five
strides inside the U.S., has felt it at the till.

Very few kids cross the white boundary line outside Sirois' door to buy
chocolate bars, even though he'll often throw in a free souvenir sucker
bearing an American flag.

Visitors say they feel it after ducking under the lakeside railway bridge.
They're uncomfortably unsure which country they're standing in.

The owners of Ouellet's Gaz bar, scene of an infamous border-breaching
crime, have been hit hard by it at the pumps.

"It" is an outbreak of American border chill, which runs down the spine of
this scenic logging town straddling the Quebec-Maine border.

The man who ended the concept of neighbourly love, American-style, is
pulling on a Molson's at his mother-in-law's kitchen table, while his wife,
Chantaile, keeps an eye on their six-month-old daughter sound asleep in a
rocker.

Michel Jalbert is the 33-year-old Canadian who became an international
celebrity last October after spending 35 days in jail for straying a few
metres into the United States to buy some gasoline. "It cost me $10,000 for
that tank of gas," he frowns.

American soil touches Pohenegamook at two key points -- the Gulf gas bar,
which sells gas for six or seven cents per litre less than at other
Canadian stations, and the U.S. Customs office half a kilometre down the road.

Technically and legally, Jalbert should've reported to American authorities
that fateful afternoon when he gave his Jeep Cherokee a fill-up for a duck
hunting expedition.

But Customs closed at 2 p.m., so Jalbert did what these common-sense folk
have always done -- entered the gas station as if there were no border at
the entrance.

Minutes later, and just three metres from safety on Canadian asphalt, he
was arrested by a zealous U.S. Border Patrol officer and charged with
illegal entry and transporting a weapon (his hunting rifle) across the border.

His memories of the incident revived, Jalbert suddenly grabs my pen and
starts sketching out the lunacy of his predicament on my notepad.

He draws the U.S. Customs office at the end of a dead-end street in Canada.
He adds an 'x' showing the gas station, also accessible only from the same
Canadian road.

"Look, if I had gone to the border station, what would've changed? I still
had to go back into Canada to reach the gas station," he fumes in French,
his drawing becoming an angry scrawl of circles and arrows.

(Mind you, the Canadian operation is almost as ludicrous. After-hours
arrivals -- as if anyone will emerge from the dense roadless forests on the
U.S. side -- must report for inspection to Clair, some 70 kilometres away
in New Brunswick.)

Charged, cuffed and hauled off to a Bangor jail, Jalbert was convicted of
the weapons offence and sentenced to time in custody, being freed one day
after his second daughter was born.

Jalbert says he received about 60 apologetic letters from Americans as word
of his case went global -- and answered every one. "It's not the Americans
I'm against. It's that one guy. I was not guilty. I didn't do anything wrong."

While there's a legal argument about that, there's no denying such
pettiness borders on the ridiculous.

Day Five - Derby Line, VT.

The guy filling up at the Irving gas station a hundred metres inside the
state line turned out to be a prophet.

"It can get bloody confusing to an outsider," he cautioned me. "Visitors
are never quite sure which country they're driving in."

Gee, no kidding. An hour later, my spouse and 12-year-old daughter had been
arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol for attempting an illegal entry back
into a country they didn't know they'd left. Only my born-in-the-U.S.A.
dual status spared me the same fate.

Along a coast-to-coast border of bizarre twists and turns, this town takes
the pretzel.

Its quirky claim to fame is the Haskell Opera House and Library, built in
1901 when Canada was only halfway to becoming a confederation of 10 provinces.

The stage and front seats are in Canada. The back rows and most of the
balcony are in the United States. The border is a strip of black tape down
a creaking wooden floor.

"The way I see it, if our production company likes it, then it has appeal,"
explains theatre founder Lynn Leimer Flint as she readies the play Forever
Plaid for its debut in four days. "The cast is three-quarters American and
the rest is Canadian, which is roughly the composition of the audience most
nights."

The theatre is one of the most-watched productions in the country, albeit
by a very fussy audience. Entrances and exits are under video surveillance
by both countries. Patrons can enter the theatre or library without
reporting for inspection, but they must return immediately to their country
of origin or face a hefty fine.

Wandering back and forth between the two nations inside the theatre is Phil
Desormeaux, production boss, actor and a recent hire as a Canada Customs
officer ("I wanted job security and needed a pension").

"Here the border's just a line through some seats. People on both sides are
still married to each other, socialize together and work together," he says.

But the border did cause many international migraines with its recent
renovation. Provincial and state labour rules forced workers to split
construction jobs down the middle of the building. And when a new elevator
arrived, the Quebec installer had to park his truck on the Canadian side
and lower the Texas-made cage down a shaft on the American side to comply
with state regulations.

Too weird. Thus motivated, I then set off to find other border-bisecting
anomalies in the townsite. And that's where trouble found us.

Only after we found ourselves face to face with a Canada Post office was
there any inkling we'd actually crossed the line into Stanstead on the
Quebec side.

Quickly turning back into Derby Line, we ran smack into the outstretched
arms of a very stern M. D. Flanagan of the U.S. Border Patrol.

"You've been setting off alarms all over the place," he harrumphed. "You've
entered Canada and returned without inspection to the United States. You
are attempting an illegal entry."

My plea for amnesty as an innocent journalist merely researching a story on
this divided town produced no sympathy and may, in fact, have backfired.

"If you're going to be doing a story on the border, you should know it's
black and white. There is no grey area. You've broken the law," Flanagan
said, seizing our passports to write up a report on our border-breaching
conduct.

After discovering my American-born status, his icy demeanour softened
considerably. Without being asked, he immediately resolved to find out
whether my daughter Andrea qualified for dual citizenship as well. Not that
I cared one way or the other.

After scanning a tattered copy of the U.S. Naturalization Act, Flanagan
determined Andrea had missed piggybacking on her father's birthright by
roughly 40 years. "Sorry. It was close," he muttered, which proves being a
border patrol officer requires little training in math.

Just before Flanagan served us with a "voluntary departure" order --
unfortunately describing it as an "arrest," which my daughter declared was
"cool" and vowed to tell all her friends -- a U.S. Customs officer wandered
over to jerk our chain some more with a few veiled threats of his own.

"If I thought there was any malicious behaviour to your conduct, I'd fine
you and seize the car," he warned me. "Just because the Border Patrol
doesn't throw the book at you doesn't mean I won't as a Customs officer."

He paused in mid-scowl for dramatic effect. "I'll let you go this time, but
if I see you around here again, say goodbye to the car and five grand."

With that, we bolted for the border. The flapping Maple Leaf never looked
so good.

Day Six -- Cornwall

A pair of shipping-channel buoys in the middle of the island-flecked
entrance to the St. Lawrence Seaway mark Canada's smuggling hot spot.

Here's where the sprawling Akwesasne Mohawk First Nation overlaps a
three-way border convergence of Ontario, Quebec and New York state.

The smugglers of Akwesasne use high-powered speedboats to rush cigarettes,
money, marijuana and humans across the river in less than a minute, taking
full illegal advantage of their unique international territory and the
element of surprise.

Lavish homes and new cars on the reserve tend to delineate the wealthy
smugglers from the humble abodes of the law-abiding majority in this
8,000-member Mohawk nation.

It falls to the largest joint force of Canadian and U.S. border enforcement
muscle in the country to track and catch the bad guys on land, water or
from the air with inside help from the Akwesasne police.

On my tour of the area arranged by Sergeant Gilles Tougas, supervisor of
the Integrated Border Enforcement Team (IBET), all was very quiet, dammit.

Tougas barreled the RCMP's 300-horsepower Zodiac around river bends at full
throttle, hoping to spot smugglers and attempt the tricky business of
bringing a 70 km/h speedboat to a full stop for boarding when, he noted
glumly, "boats don't have brakes." Alas, none were sighted.

Another few hours monitoring undercover forces tracking suspicious car
departures off the reserve nabbed only one minor infraction which didn't
even fall under RCMP jurisdiction. It involved an unlucky native named
John, whose car was pulled over by no fewer than four cruisers mere minutes
after picking up official notification that his driver's licence had been
suspended for a New York impaired charge.

Still, it's a daunting task for members of this two-year-old IBET team, who
only recently obtained the technology to communicate with each other by
radio and still can't cross each other's borders in pursuit of criminals.

While the smuggling methods have stayed the same, the goods have changed
over time. In the early 1990s, it was primarily cigarettes. Then came
illegal immigrants. More than a thousand were apprehended after paying
smugglers about $1,000 each for their minute-long dash toward the
sweatshops of America five years ago. This year, there'll be less than a
hundred.

Today's contraband of choice is marijuana -- big bucks are being smuggled
into Canada in exchange for state-bound "Quebec Gold" dope.

"Because of the geography, we're fighting an uphill battle no matter what
we do," says U.S. Homeland Security investigator Mark Flick. "We get a fast
boat, they get a faster boat. Our budget is limited, theirs is unlimited."

"Short of putting up an iron wall and posting guards every 10 feet, we
can't stop it," agrees Tougas. But then his mouth curls into a slightly
evil grin. "But we're getting a new boat." How fast, you ask? "Let's just
say it'll be very, very fast."

Day Seven -- Windsor

Car traffic is down 20%. Truck counts have flatlined. There has not been a
major backup in five weeks. So what's with the nation's notorious border
bottleneck?

Well, as the Clintonian theory goes, it's the economy, stupid. With the
U.S. in the economic doldrums, the crush at this pivotal crossing has eased
and the memory of those 36-kilometre lineups following 9/11 has faded.

But when the economy picks up, Remo Mancini has a plan to keep his beloved
Ambassador Bridge to Detroit, a billion-dollar-a-day trade corridor that
handles 20c of every exported dollar, open for faster, better business. The
solution is to get traffic-jamming security inspections away from the bridge.

Mancini, executive vice-president of bridge owner Canadian Transit Company,
is pushing Canada and the U.S. to surrender sovereignty over roughly 80
acres of territory in an unprecedented land swap to complete inspections
before cars and trucks reach the bridge.

"We're in the Stone Age now," argues Mancini. "They traverse the entire
bridge before somebody says, 'Hey, what's in the truck?' If they're going
to blow up the bridge, it's already done before they get to the inspection
station."

Using existing pre-clearance procedures for vehicles and drivers, Mancini
figures 50% to 70% of all traffic could be expedited along a dedicated
roadway to the bridge within five years using this reverse-inspection scheme.

Unfortunately, the Americans haven't quite reached Mancini's high-octane
level of impatient confidence. "Taking the location for security inspection
away from the immediate border makes sense ... but a lot of scenarios went
away with 9/11," allows Andy Ziegler, Michigan's transportation planning
director. "It's becoming a serious consideration, but we have plenty of
time to address the issue."

In other words: Canada, don't hold your breath.

Part two of a five-part series.; Tomorrow: Toronto's Mount Trashmore rises
in Michigan