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Ensure our borders

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The first duty of a state, they teach in Political Science 101, is to ensure its borders. Here in Canada, however, we have a government that can spend $1 billion on a gun registry and $250 million on a sponsorship program and who knows how much on day care, but which has abolished Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachments at many border points.

The result, the federal government admits, is that as many as 1,600 cars just "blew through" border customs booths last year and entered Canada illegally. The union for customs-office staff says the numbers are much larger.

This is not very reassuring. More than 1,000 guns are seized at the border each year. How many more, and what else, did those 1,600 scofflaw vehicles hold?

The customs officers' union wants a small new border protection force, its members armed (and well-paid). This would cost some $15 million a year in salaries alone.

We're not buying it. Canada doesn't need a new paramilitary force, of any size. It's good news that Public Security Minister Anne McLellan quickly rejected the proposal.

But she has had less to say about the fact that, to save money, the RCMP closed nine border posts in Quebec alone last year, leaving them with no real enforcement presence. The Mounties now have Border Enforcement Teams, 15 of them across the country including just four for all of Quebec.

RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli brushes off border concerns. He told a Commons committee last week that the force now emphasizes intelligence and analysis. The new teams are "located strategically" and so are "better able to respond." Canadians need not worry about the border, he said. We can trust him.

We're not buying this, either. To hear the Customs union people tell it, the border is wide open; Zaccardelli's claim is almost precisely the opposite. Neither matches the facts.

Canadians should not become obsessed, as many in the United States now seem to be, with trying to seal the border perfectly against everyone with a handgun, a kilo of marijuana, or an illegal alien in the trunk. Even if every official crossing point were staffed 24 hours a day, there's no shortage of remote bits of border. Sensors and electronic surveillance may serve the United States but are a lower priority here.

Intelligence work, analysis, and co-ordination, Zaccardelli-style, can surely be useful, not only against terrorism but also against drug-, gun-, and people-running. This kind of work was, we fear, sadly neglected in Canada before Sept. 11, 2001. In the new era we have no choice but to hope the authorities are doing a better job of threat analysis.