More Balanced Mutual Agreements

Police investigate a shooting at the border crossing in Surrey, B.C., last October in which a Canadian border guard was shot by a man who then killed himself. A cross-border pilot project that would see joint patrols between Canadian and U.S. police officers is being delayed by U.S. demands its officers be exempt from Canadian law. (Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press)

Sounded pretty good when it was first announced. Makes perfectly good sense for two countries sitting geographically side by side, sharing a long border, sharing as well similar social security concerns and laws, to pool their efforts. For the greater good of security, accountability, and overall defence against the fairly universal scourge of terrorist acts aimed at intimidating and spreading havoc, fear, destruction and death.

When the Canada-U.S. border security pact had first been announced a few years back, it was thought of as a forward-looking response to shared security concerns. Concerns that have had a damaging impact on the passage of trade between the two countries whose industries are closely intertwined. The then-proposed perimeter security and trade agreement was designed to ease travel, aid in cross-border business and benefit both countries equally.

The coordination would help to minimize the kind of red tape and delays that have impacted deleteriously on trade, jobs, tourism and trust between the two countries, estimated to cost the Canadian economy up to $16-billion annually in its implementation. Smoothing out trade access with Canada's largest, most reliable, and traditional trading partner sounded like an idea whose time had come in the long wake since September 11, 2001 which began the cross-border hold-ups.

Canada had few security concerns respecting the Americans, but it is well enough known the distrust with which the United States administration holds Canadian security, considering its lapses responsible for the dreadful September 11 events. Whose fall-out was a series of mea culpas and alterations in co-operation between the two American security agencies, but which didn't stop the head of Homeland Security voicing the same claims of Canadian security lapses.

Whereas in truth it was the Americans' own lack of co-operation between the FBI, the CIA and the State Department whose alertness laxity was finally admitted to have been at fault; visas had been issued to the 9-11 jihadists; (a few of whom were on suspect lists) they were taught aviation skills by American flying academies; they lived and plotted while on America soil.

All truths which had never stopped America security officials from citing Canadian security gaps with responsibility in America's agony.

At the time of the agreement between Canada and the United States to share border security for the purpose of easing American security concerns, it was emphasized that there would be no loss of sovereignty to Canada in the signing of the agreement. But like every and any agreement that has historically taken place between the two countries, Canada ends up getting the stick's short, sharp end. America the Bully asserts its interests and Canada takes a hesitant step back.

And this is precisely what appears to be happening now. Just as the U.S. Congress pulls the strings and asserts its primacy on decision making to override agreements reached with the FTA and then the succeeding NAFTA agreement, so too in this instance is the Untied States pulling rank as the more powerful in the agreement. The United States is now insisting that within the integrated security teams in intelligence and criminal investigations, their personnel must be held to American laws at all times.

If members of the RCMP happen to be working jointly with the FBI on American territory, it is American law that applies to both. If the FBI is working on Canadian soil, it is answerable not to Canadian law, but to American law. No American security officer working within Canada who may be charged with illegal or criminal activity for any reason, may be prosecuted under Canadian law, in other words; whereas the reverse would see Canadian officers charged with an offence being prosecuted under American law, on U.S. soil.

Heads I won, tails you lost.