How to fix the mess at the Canada-U.S. border
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
I’ve been trying to figure out lately what the attraction is to getting involved in this cult of governing that seems increasingly to weigh upon us. The bank bailouts and their economic consequences, the conviction that climate change may be cured by taxation, all have become reasons to legislate, legislate, legislate. Grand schemes of ‘governance’, treaties, etc., have become mainstream news, whether they deal with bailout packages, free trade agreements (consisting of thousands of pages of regulations), or border relations. Laws that will stagger economies, alter the price of food for billions, and install ’security’ measures at every border are passed with little remark since each comes, conveniently, after a major crisis necessitating its installation. Take as exemplar this set of recommendations from the Brookings Institute, a respected thinktank we’re told – Christopher Sand, the author, suggests the best way to install a new border security regime is to decentralize it, which means of course to have an agreement wherein each side of the border agrees to do the exact same thing. This is decentralization? Border agencies are installing interlocking systems to run you through a database, to scan your ID and legal records each time you pass a checkpoint, checkpoints which are (disturbingly) spreading inwards from the borders. Back to my original question – why put all your energy into this when you could be, say, figuring out how to build feasible starcraft instead? Like many things, it too is simply a large scale engineering problem. But instead, the regulators are interested in engineering human surveillance networks built on distrust and state mythology. Could we possibly take a pass on this?
Kelly McParland, National Post
July 14,2009
The Brookings Institution has taken a look at the Canada-U.S. border mess and come up with some recommendations.
Brookings is a respected Washington think tank generally considered Democrat-friendly. The report was written by Christopher Sands, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, where he specializes in Canada and U.S.-Canada relations.
The conclusions lean toward decentralization of border responsibility so calls can be made by officials who understand the difference between Mexico and Canada, rather than by office-bound bureaucrats in Washington. At least that’s what I think they say. It depends what you mean by “greater lateral communication and resource-sharing without recourse to Washington,” and “Adopt a Total Quality Management (TQM) model of continuous process improvement.”
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