U.S. AND CANADA: HOLDING THE LINE

Two Nations Try To Raise Defenses While Staying Friends

Windsor, Ontario - The day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, John
Power, a trucker out of Moncton, New Brunswick, was hauling 40,000 pounds
of limes into Canada from Laredo, Texas. He arrived at the truck inspection
plaza in Detroit for a routine clearance - and was met by two National
Guardsmen pointing guns at his face.

"It was like a war zone," says Power, a 10-year veteran of U.S.-Canadian
border travel, the international equivalent of crossing the neighbor's
yard. Until then, a stop at customs usually consisted of three or four
questions in a bored drone - "Citizenship? Destination? Anything to
declare?" - and then a wave forward.

His heart racing, Power stared at the gun barrels for several minutes while
inspectors examined his documents and truck. "When they were through with
me, they didn't apologize . . . they just said, 'OK, you're done,' and that
was it."

Six months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, guards with guns, rarely seen at the Port of Detroit before, are
permanently stationed there. They are evidence of the dramatic increase in
attention being paid to the U.S.-Canadian border - attention long overdue
in light of the geographic and economic relationships between the
countries, and the need to balance security and ease of movement.

Canada and the United States are each other's largest trading partner, and
theirs is the largest trading partnership in the world. Goods worth more
than $1 billion cross every day; the combined value of imports and exports
reached $380 billion last year. Canada is Wisconsin's largest trading
partner, too; Wisconsin exports close to $4 billion worth of goods to
Canada a year.

And yet much of the U.S.-Canadian border - the largest in the world, with
roughly 4,000 miles cutting across North America and another 1,500 miles
separating Alaska from British Columbia and the Yukon - has been relatively
unguarded. Much of it passes through punishing terrain or icy waters.

Dozens of crossings are marked by orange cones and a "Closed" sign late at
night. Travelers are expected to go the nearest 24-hour station. They used
to be unwatched; today, they are monitored by border agents.

Other changes are more sophisticated. The United States and Canada have
signed a 30-point pact to ensure the free flow of goods and ease of travel.
Canada has pledged about $750 million to boost security and improve aging
border stations. It is now considering arming its customs agents -
something the agents' union has sought for years. On the U.S. side,
President Bush has proposed putting $10.7 billion into border security,
most of it for hiring new agents and for high-tech detection equipment.

About 245 border agents will be reassigned to the northern border later
this year, almost doubling the number assigned as of December. About 700
unarmed National Guard troops will be assigned in the coming months to
patrol the Canadian border. And special sensors that detect nuclear
materials are now in use.

There always have been problems associated with the northern border, though
not to the same degree as those of the Mexican boundary, where some 9,000
U.S. agents are on patrol.

But smuggling of drugs, alcohol, guns and tobacco - going all the way back
to Prohibition - has been a recurring problem. Lately, it's been "B.C. bud"
- - hydroponically grown marijuana from British Columbia - coming south;
handguns going north; and child abductors with children going both ways.
There has been illegal immigration, too. American agents have captured
Mexicans and Latin Americans who tried to enter the U.S. through Canada.

When the Canadian Security Intelligence Service last year identified more
than 50 potential terrorist cells in Canada, the northern border looked
ripe for the picking.

'Like going to a suburb'

Where vacant, harsh land is the chief obstacle to security along much of
the border, in Detroit-Windsor, the problem is volume. It is the busiest
land crossing in North America, with about 40 million people going back and
forth a year. About a quarter of all U.S. trade with Canada comes over the
Ambassador Bridge or through the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel.

People who cross frequently have grown used to more inspections, more
questions, more demands to prove they are who they say they are. Most seem
to appreciate the extra attention.

"We've had far fewer complaints since September 11," says Angela Ryan, U.S.
Customs Service port director in Detroit. "There is more of an awareness
now. Before, people would ask, 'Why was I stopped?' and we used to have to
remind them, 'Well, you are crossing an international border.' It is like
going to a suburb rather than a foreign country."

Detroit and Windsor are the two nations in microcosm. Detroit and its
suburbs have 5.4 million people; Windsor and Essex County, 350,000. The
United States has 281 million people; Canada, 31 million. The cities are
connected by ties of trade, blood and history as far back as the 1850s,
when Canada's Northwest Trading Company established posts in Windsor to
exploit the Detroit market.

But even here, there are tensions between two nations.

"Americans base everything on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,"
says Maxine Sidran, a Racine native who has lived in Canada for about 30
years. "For Canadians, it's peace, order and good government. The
implications are immense."

Canada threw its support behind the campaign in Afghanistan, agreeing for
the first time in its history to have its troops take orders from American
commanders. Canadian spy networks were assisting American intelligence long
before any missiles flew.

Yet Canadians were offended that the U.S. did not immediately classify
Afghans being held at Guantanamo Bay as prisoners of war, subject to
protections under the Geneva Convention.

Many were uneasy with Bush's hawkish call against the "axis of evil."

They resent that Canada, under pressure from the U.S., is re-evaluating its
open-armed immigration stance toward people fleeing their homeland. The
latest high-profile case to thrust the policy into question: A
Tunisian-born man who claimed to be a refugee and obtained Canadian
citizenship in 1995. He has now been identified as one of five potential
suicide attackers seen on a videotape found in Kandahar.

To many Canadians, who have always seen themselves as peacemakers, this
unilateral stance, to borrow the words of the first President Bush, will
not stand.

"What we have now is a hegemonic power which is flexing its muscle," says
John Godfrey, a member of Canada's House of Commons.

Trade and more trade

But philosophical differences rarely keep nations from doing business with
each other. It was trade - and trade only - that motivated the handful of
Detroit businessmen to build Detroit River crossings. The Ambassador Bridge
opened in 1929; the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel a year later.

Detroit is one of only two international ports in America dealing with
every mode of transportation: land, water, rail and air. (The other is
Brownsville, Texas.)

All trucks going in and out of the Port of Detroit must pass through the
truck inspection station at the bridge. Ryan, the port director, has
handled some 25 media tours of the area since Sept. 11, and she doesn't
take it lightly. Even so, it's a bit of a dog-and-pony show by now: There's
the droopy National Guard tent, looking like a reject from the Bosnian
campaign, where guardsmen and inspectors do random inspections on trucks;
there are the inspection booths, the trucks rolling through at a rate of a
half-dozen a minute; and there's the new baby - a mobile X-ray machine, a
utility truck with a giant mechanical arm that searches a semi's contents.
A sophisticated time-saver, it costs $975,000.

Time is money at this port.

The combination of fewer trade restrictions, which took effect with the
North American Free Trade Agreement in the early '90s, and "just-in-time
manufacturing," which has trucks delivering machine parts and other
essentials to automakers on demand, has pushed commercial trade to levels
never anticipated.

Trucks rumble over the bridge all day long, some of them four or five times
a day. Each of the lanes is about 12 feet wide; trucks on the outside, cars
on the inside. During the midweek hustle, the trucks form a moving wall;
for cars, it is like driving through a roofless tunnel.

The tunnel traffic is considerably lighter, with more passenger cars and
about 600 trucks a day.

As for the rest of the trade, barges bearing rail cars with hazardous
materials float down the Detroit River all day. And there's Detroit
Metropolitan Airport, about 20 miles away.

But the truck traffic is the key to the trade. Think of it as "a rolling
inventory, just another part of the assembly line," says Ben Anderson,
chief inspector at Detroit's Fort Street Cargo Facility, where truck driver
John Power met the armed Guardsmen on Sept. 12.

A Detroit native with 33 years spent working the border, Anderson has a
cool, easy manner. He looks like what he is - a grandfather - except those
alert eyes betray his training.

Some 6,000 to 7,000 trucks a day funnel through the plaza, renovated in
1993 to handle up to 5,000.

"If we have issues with a load, it does slow up traffic," Anderson says.

Slow traffic can't begin to describe what happened in the days immediately
after Sept. 11. With U.S. inspectors under orders to check every cab, trunk
and change holder, vehicles backed up through city streets, choking freeway
exits. Trucks on the Canadian side were nose to toe for seven miles to
Ontario's Highway 401. Auto plants ground to a halt, their assembly parts
locked in traffic.

It lasted for days.

"It was . . . unprecedented," says Matt Marchand, struggling for the right
word to describe the mess. A policy adviser to Windsor's mayor, Marchand
has lived and worked in Windsor most of his life. "The backups were
measured in miles and hours."

These days, initiatives such as pass-cards, off-site inspections and
preapproval of goods through computerized filing mean those who cross all
the time can get through faster, leaving agents to concentrate on those
they know nothing about.

Most say traffic is actually faster now than it was before. But businesses,
particularly on the Canadian side, struggle against perceptions of border
stalls.

Discretionary travel - restaurant-goers, Casino Windsor gamblers - fell
more than 30% after the attacks. The tunnel's business, a gauge of
discretionary city-to-city travelers, dropped 50%. Some of that business
has returned; the tunnel is now at 75% of its pre-Sept. 11 business. But
some might never come back.

Personal fears continue

Fears of more attacks remain. The bridge, with its vital commercial
traffic, and the tunnel, which spills out next to General Motors
headquarters in downtown Detroit, look like targets to locals.

"I hate that they (terrorists) make me think about it now," says Detroit
resident Patti Brown, who hasn't crossed since Sept. 11. "It's even freaky
working here."

Brown, 51, speaks from the basement of the Renaissance Center, GM's
headquarters, where she manages an upscale coffee shop. The center's black
and gray columns look like giant lipsticks on the low-slung Detroit
skyline, the most conspicuous piece of real estate for miles.

Thirty years ago, Brown was a sarong-and-sandal girl in a steel-and-smoke
city. She decided to move to Montreal.

"Coming from here, I was exposed to this whole new world. I loved it," she
says. "My world would have been much smaller if I'd stayed home."

Back in her native Detroit, Brown watches Canadian television and expects
to hire some Canadians to work in the store this summer, as she has done in
the past. But that is the extent of her contact with Canada these days.

"For them to do what they did - learn to fly, hijack planes. . . . One
thing you can say about these people, they weren't stupid," she says. "I
work a little too close to the tunnel for comfort. I just feel it could be
very easy for someone to penetrate that border."

Across the river, the sentiments are shared.

Eric Mayne grew up in Windsor, born of a Canadian mother and an American
father, and crossed the line often to visit family and friends in Michigan.
He celebrated both the Canadian and American Thanksgivings, Canada Day and
the Fourth of July.

He crosses the bridge every day from Windsor to work at Ward's Automotive
Reports in Southfield, Mich.

He never used to think anything of it: Take a right off Huron Church Road,
round a bend, head onto the bridge, hear the thwump-thwump of tires over
the metal connectors, scramble for the $3.50 toll, glare at the pickup
driver who cut in, smile at the guy in the booth.

The routine isn't so mundane now.

"Ever since September 11, whenever I get over that bridge I feel like I've
just dodged a bullet," Mayne says.

Dissolve the border?

Some believe security would be simpler if there were no border at all, and
both countries could concentrate on securing their shores. The view is
common among business people near the border.

"The world is becoming borderless," says Alfie Morgan, a business professor
at the University of Windsor who specializes in cross-border trade. "If
there is any part of the world that should be borderless, it should be
Canada and the U.S."

Free trade and other pacts have gone far in removing tariffs and other
sticking points to easy commerce, so "why not go all the way?" asks Morgan,
echoing a frequently heard argument.

Canada's trade relationship with America already accounts for 80% of its
economy, so "are we having all this hullabaloo over 20 percent?"

"And what is the rest of Canada anyway? What are we trying to preserve? The
Yukon? Northern Alberta?"

Morgan advises companies how to navigate the dizzying waters of customs and
taxes for the two nations. He supports controversial ideas, such as Canada
adopting the American dollar and allowing U.S. Customs agents to sit on the
Canadian side to inspect trucks before they reach the Fort Street station.

His borderless theory is not outlandish here. There are few places on the
planet where two countries come so close to being a single unit as the
Detroit-Windsor corridor.

Windsorites watch Detroit television, listen to Detroit radio and root for
Detroit sports teams. Some even speak with a touch of a Midwestern accent,
with flat, drawn-out vowels, instead of the more clipped tones heard around
Toronto. They can tell you where to eat in Greektown and where to park at
Joe Louis Arena for a Red Wings game. Detroiters watched live Olympics
coverage on the CBC, know where to get the best steak in Windsor and jog on
Windsor's riverfront.

"It is extremely unique," says Marchand, the Windsor mayoral adviser. ". .
. It's very cosmopolitan. And then there is this huge trading relationship
that sits on top of that."

But the debate over joining the U.S. is an old chestnut north of the 49th
Parallel, where a remarkable amount of energy is spent trying to keep
American culture at bay. Consider Canadian content laws: Canadian TV
stations and radio stations must air at least 30% Canadian-made
programming; American filmmakers who make their movies in Canada have to
use a percentage of Canadians to be eligible for government grants.

As for the idea of armed U.S. border agents on the Windsor side, some
Canadians regard this as an offense to their sense of peace and order, a
threat to their sovereignty.

Sovereignty, shmovereignty, Mayne says; protecting the bridge is purely a
matter of public safety.

"This whole sovereignty debate going on in Ottawa (expletive) me off to no
end," he says. "Those people have no clue what it's like to travel that
bridge every daybeside these trucks.It's outrageous. You know, Canadians
often talk about American ignorance ofCanadian customs and culture. Well,
that (debate) is a glaring example ofCanadian ignorance."

Morgan isn't likely to get his wish. The line separating the United States
from Canada might fade in places such as Detroit-Windsor, but it won't
disappear.

For some Canadians, 90% of whom live within 100 miles of the border, that
line signifies part of who they are.

"Yes, we have to make sure we have access to the American market," says
Godfrey, the member of Parliament. But maintaining a distinct Canadian
identity is essential, too.

"What if those two are incompatible? Do we swallow our adherence to our own
laws and international laws? How far do we go in terms of clamping down on
our own civil liberties just to keep the border open? I would have to say
for me, I don't think that trade is number one. We're not placed on this
planet to trade at all costs."