Canada–United States border

“ Lawrence Valley, have travelled along the Saskatchewan when the United States farmers rushed into the wheat belt, and have seen the Klondike and the Yukon when they were still pouring streams of gold into the world.
We of the United States are vitally interested in the Canadians. We are largely of the same blood, and the lines of our national lives have run along side by side. Thousands of us have relatives in the Dominion, for more than a million former American citizens are now living on the other side of the border. ”

“ Canada may be an English possession, but to us it is part of America, and certainly no two countries have rested side by side in greater friendship than the "Dominion" and the United States. You can find no great fortifications along the 3000 odd miles of border between Canada and the United States. The countries have lived in peace and harmony and together, or side by side they have battled for peace on the fields of Flanders. ”

“ People living along the Canadian border, whose livelihood depended on the trade with Canada, did not regard this trade as being the evil which Jefferson declared it to be. For them it was a matter of economic survival. Soon after the Land Embargo became a law, smuggling rings had begun operations along the border.41 Dress goods and other merchandise were carried to the border on the Canadian side, where it was picked up by men and transported through the woods into the United States. ”

“ With a mile of track for every twenty-three people, Canada has more railroads in proportion to her population than any other country on earth. Only the United States and Russia have a greater total mileage. Geographically, British America extends from our northern border to the Arctic Ocean, but the active life of the Dominion is mostly confined to a strip of territory averaging less than five hundred miles wide from north to south and more than three thousand miles long. ”

“ A land of vast distances and rich natural resources, Canada became a self-governing dominion in 1867 while retaining ties to the British crown. Economically and technologically the nation has developed in parallel with the US, its neighbor to the south across an unfortified border. Canada's paramount political problem is meeting public demands for quality improvements in health care and education services after a decade of budget cuts. The issue of reconciling Quebec's francophone heritage with the majority anglophone Canadian population has moved to the back burner in recent years ”

“ Between 350,000 and 400,000 people every year enter Canada with the intention of making Canada their home: 60,000 of these cross the border from the United States. Probably 50,000 to 70,000 are emigrants from the various non-British countries. The remainder are from the British Isles, and chiefly from England, Scotland, and Wales. The Irish prefer to go to the United States, where some twelve millions of people of Irish blood are already settled, and nearly every Irish family in the homeland has some representative in the States who will lend a helping hand. ”

“ This includes a stronger trading relationship between the United States and Canada. It includes safe, efficient, and responsible cross-border travel and migration. And it includes close partnership on domestic and international security.
America is deeply fortunate to have a neighbor like Canada. We have before us the opportunity to build even more bridges, and bridges of cooperation and bridges of commerce. Both of us are committed to bringing greater prosperity and opportunity to our people. ”

“ There are only two railway systems in Canada, both crossing Canada east and west from the Atlantic to the Pacific. These lines generally parallel the United States border, in some instances crossing through the United States. ”

“ Many Canadians crossed the frontier to fight in the armies of the North, and many Southerners took refuge in Canada, some of whom made raids across the border into the villages and towns of the North. These raids created a bad feeling towards Canada, so that when the war was over and the Reciprocity Treaty expired in 1866, the United States Government refused to renew it. Canada also suffered from the ill-will of the American Government in another way. ”

“ In addition, few restrictions apply to countries of origin for persons seeking entry into Canada. Unlike the visa waiver program in the United States, which grants entry without a visa to residents of only 27 countries, Canada grants visa-free entry to residents of nearly 60 countries. This number includes Greece, Mexico, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia. Canada relies on paper identification for immigrants, forged versions of which are available on the black market for roughly $1,000. [10]
Those found to be misrepresenting themselves at the border do not face any ban. ”

“ Immigration and Refugee Policy Canada’s immigration policy and entrepreneur program allow foreign nationals to enter the country with relative ease and become Canadian residents, thereby positioning themselves for easy access to the United States. Each year approximately 300,000 people are allowed entry into Canada, twice the number per capita that the United States allows in. ”

“ US works closely with Canada to intensify security measures for monitoring and controlling legal and illegal movement of people, transport, and commodities across the international border; sovereignty dispute with Denmark over Hans Island in the Kennedy Channel between Ellesmere Island and Greenland ”

“ This is to a large extent true, but one great reason has been that Canada, as it exists to-day, was not in existence when Canada was not one nation. most of the boundary questions came up for settlement. The interests of a Dominion—except in potentiality—were not at stake, and there was no Canadian nation to make its voice heard. For two-thirds of a century after the United States became an independent nation, in the North-West the Hudson’s Bay Company or its rivals in the fur trade, on the Pacific coast the beginnings of a small separate British colony, were nearly all that was in evidence. ”

“ The United States were independent. But, however much the war in America, between Great Britain and her own old colonies, had temporarily interfered with, it had paved the way for a more extended, commerce in Canada. There were men in New England who would not, on any account, be rebels. Many of these, with their families, sought an asylum in Canada, and the advancement of the Far West, on the British side of the lines, is, in no small degree, to be attributed to the integrity and energy of those highly honourable men. Canada was then entirely, or almost entirely, under military rule. ”

“ Whatever comes to menace the United States will menace the safety of Canada; and with swift cruisers, Europe and Asia are nearer Canada to-day than Halifax is near Vancouver. Either city could be attacked by foreign powers before military aid could be transported across the width of Canada. We are nearer Europe to-day than the North was near the South in the Civil War. It takes a shorter time to transport troops across Atlantic or Pacific than it formerly took to send a Minnesota regiment to Maryland. ”

“ Upon the declaration of war, the government of the United States despatched as skilful an officer, as they had, to arm the American vessels on Lake Erie, and on Lake Ontario, with the view of gaining, if possible, the ascendancy on those great inland waters, which separate a great portion of Canada from the United States. ”

“ The great English colony which stirs the pages of more than two centuries of history has for its capitals such proud and notable cities as Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, Halifax, and many others, to distinguish the progressive civilization of the region east of Lake Huron—the older provinces. But the Canada of the geographies of to-day is a land of greater area than the United States; it is, in fact, the "British America" of old. A great trans-Canadian railway has joined the ambitious province of the Pacific slope to the provinces of old Canada with stitches of steel across the Plains. ”

“ The United States already embraces so vast a country, divided into forty-four states and four territories, exclusive of Alaska and the Indian Territory, that any addition to the number of states would tend to weaken the system, and the conversion of the provinces of Canada into states of our Union would introduce new elements of discord, while with Canada as an independent and friendly republic we could, by treaties or concurrent legislation, secure to each the benefit of free trade and intercourse with the other, and without the danger of weakening the United States. ”

“ Canada must be free, because she has a vital interest in the American aspect of such an Alliance that even Britain has not. This nation is the electric transmission transformer between Britain and the United States. There is a Pacific zone of policy in which Canada has a big stake. ”

“ Though they also do an enormous amount of work on river and coastal steamers, the manager of the largest and oldest plant in the United States told me personally that with the high price of labor and material in America, his shipyard could not last a day without government contracts for war vessels, torpedoes, dredges, etc. Front door on the Pacific means that to Canada, and it means more; for Canada belongs to an empire that has vaster dominions to defend in Asia than in Europe. ”

“ It lies on that warm gulf whose farther shores were more historical three hundred years ago than now. As time advances and we complete our own connections and general developments we see more and more that the American destiny must be southward. Canada, which has had a much longer history than the United States, presents even now but a thin rim of settlement, and her entire population from the banks of Newfoundland to Vancouver’s Island is not equal to that of the single state of New York. ”