The Foreign Service Journal, October 2007

seamlessly through a border that efficiently screens out the illegal, the unhealthy or the dangerous. The raw numbers are numbing: $1.4 billion in two-way commer- cial traffic per day; 200 million crossings of the U.S.- Canadian border at 150 ports of entry (just 90 of which are staffed) every year. Those statistics translate into a reality where the CEO of Home Depot Canada says the company trades more with the city of Atlanta than the entire country trades with France. More trade moves across the Ambassador Bridge spanning Detroit and Windsor than U.S. commerce with all of Japan. With upward of 80 percent of all exports heading to the U.S. and with an economy whose GDP is 20 percent dependent on trade, Canada’s preoccupation with a functioning border is nonstop. It has to be; the cost to Canadian business of a border closure is estimated at $100 million per hour. The United States shares that economic burden, of course, both because so much of the trade takes place within firms, and because many of the businesses are U.S.-owned. Developing Zones of Confidence Taking this concern into account, Washington has sought to frame its post-9/11 border security enhance- ments in terms of protecting the trade and prosperity that benefits all three nations. In a dual-bilateral fashion, the U.S. launched action plans with Canada and Mexico for secure, smart borders that increased the use of infra- structure, technology and personnel to monitor border crossings — especially overland borders. With Canada, the United States agreed in December 2001 to “develop a zone of confidence against terrorist activity” by securing the flow of people and the flow of goods, improving border infrastructure and increasing information-sharing. Innovations included the provision of passenger data in advance, non-intrusive in- spections of cargo and harmonized commercial processes at the border to move goods faster. A 22-point “U.S.- Mexico Border Partnership Action Plan” followed shortly thereafter, seeking to eliminate border bottlenecks while securing infrastructure and the flow of people. In addi- F O C U S O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 15