‘Shocked’: Revisiting the Great US-Canada Border Shutdown

Five years ago, COVID-19 stopped the world. Admittedly, Canada’s first case of the novel coronavirus was confirmed in late January 2020, but for many, the reality and gravity of the global pandemic set in sometime in mid-March.

For me, it was March 16, when my son was born at home amid citywide closures of most public spaces, like libraries, theatres, and park board facilities. Or maybe the next morning, when a public health emergency was formally declared in B.C., panic buying began and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau urged Canadians to “stay at home, and don’t go out unless absolutely necessary.”

For journalist Edward Alden and researcher Laurie Trautman, the most significant moment likely came a few days after that, at midnight on March 20, when the Canada-U.S. border was closed to all non-essential travel. Their new book, When the World Closed Its Doors: the COVID-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders, examines the impact of this decision, the breakdown in global cooperation and what the most sweeping government border closures in human history tell us about the future of borders, both here and abroad.

Recently, Alden and Trautman sat down with the Tyee to discuss their new book, the problem with rigid border controls, the rising tide of populism and nationalism and what may be the most chilling, enduring symptom of the global pandemic.

“COVID taught governments — in a way that had been far from certain beforehand — that borders could be closed or heavily restricted for extended periods with strong public support and minimal disruption to the everyday lives of most of their people,” the authors explain.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: When the World Closed Its Doors warrants big congratulations. Not only did you give the world a thought-provoking book, but you did something few are inclined to do, post-pandemic: look back on what happened five years ago. What made you want to do that?

Trautman: I run a research institute that’s focused on the Canada-U.S. border from a policy perspective. When COVID happened and the border was heavily restricted, I was shocked. We just really did not anticipate this level of restriction in travel between Canada and the U.S. All of a sudden, there was this whole new ball game on the border. I ended up interacting with a lot of people who were really struggling, trying to figure out when they’d be able to see their partners and their grandkids again. And it seemed like such an important story to tell because, as you said, other people really weren’t telling it, even after a couple years passed.

Alden: I lived in Washington, D.C. for about 20 years, and my wife and I had moved back to Bellingham to be close to our families, most of whom were on the Canadian side of the border. When the border closed, I couldn’t see my mid-80s mother, couldn’t see my sister. Our daughter was at UBC. We were cut off from her and the park at the border there, Peace Arch Park became a real lifeline for me. I saw my mother there almost every month. So it was really important for me personally. Like Laurie, I thought there was a bigger story here.

The Peace Arch border crossing is a legendary space now, for what it allowed people to do. But it wasn’t the only way around the rules. There were still 17 million crossings in the 20 months that the U.S. restricted land border travel, according to your book. I know that’s down from 100 million, but 17 million is a lot and more than enough, one could argue, to conclude that the border restrictions were not that effective.

Alden: Most of those crossings were commercial crossings. The U.S. and Canadian governments both realized that if trade was disrupted and the grocery store shelves were emptying out, that people would panic. So they declared all trade as essential. You could have truckers coming from the most heavily infected parts of the United States, and they would drive freely into Canada.

There were also cross-border workers, particularly in the health-care sector, who were considered essential and moved back and forth. But you had people who had very, very strong personal needs to cross. Family members dying, girlfriends who’d had a miscarriage and they needed their partner with them, families separated, and those people were declared non-essential. And they were not permitted to cross.

It feels like there’s a real uphill battle to get people to understand how scary it was to learn that nations and governments can do this, let alone to appreciate or prioritize the social, personal and psychological costs created. As you note, the border closures were incredibly popular.

Trautman: Part of the reason for writing the book was to say, hey, this border restriction and the inability to cross borders during COVID affected people that normally had no problem crossing borders. They had the right passport, for instance.

There’s been so much advocacy around immigrant rights and better cross-border mobility. One of our goals in writing the book was to say there is now a whole other wide group of people, another population that has experienced similar things. And so there should be a broader advocacy network around pointing out that these restrictions have a lot of costs, and the benefits are highly questionable.

I’m struck by this line from early in the book. “COVID taught governments that borders could be closed or heavily restricted for extended periods with strong public support… The temptation to do so in similar crises will be irresistible.” That’s terrifying, and also seems like one of the most lasting symptoms of COVID-19.

Alden: There were a lot of “progressive governments” who went down this road of thinking that border closures were a way to protect themselves from the pandemic, and that had knock-on consequences. There was an international playbook here for dealing with pandemics. It involved cooperation among nations — scientific cooperation — and quite explicitly, if you look at the International Health Regulations, did not involve border closures, except for very limited periods of times for specific reasons. And yet, you had a progressive country like Canada, a very progressive country like New Zealand, in a much more dramatic way, closing its borders very tight.

Unfortunately, that has fed into what we’re seeing around the world, which is populist parties, mostly on the right, saying that border closures are the solution to all sorts of evils. They’re a way to keep out unwanted migrants; they’re a way to keep out crime; they’re a way to keep out drugs; they’re a way to keep out terrorists.

And I think it’s harder for governments that are more invested in international cooperation to say, look, that’s not the right approach, we need to work together on these problems. Because when push came to shove in the pandemic, they closed their borders too. So I think it left an unfortunate legacy for what we’re dealing with today, in terms of the populist right seeing hard borders as the solution to all sorts of problems, which they are not.

Is the solution open borders?

Alden: One of the lessons in the aftermath of 9/11, when you saw very deep U.S.-Canadian cooperation, is that there are ways to use borders to mitigate some of these risks. But they’re only one element of a much broader suite of responses. For example, what South Korea did and how it married its public health system with much more flexible border restrictions. So the book is not really an argument for open borders. It’s more an argument for intelligent borders enforced in a compassionate way.

I feel like whenever you’re trying to make a more nuanced case like that, you tend to lose people who want simple solutions and someone to blame.

Alden: Even in South Korea, it wasn’t entirely popular. People criticized the president for not shutting tighter to China.

Trautman: You kind of hit the nail on the head. That’s exactly it. You’re fighting a bit against a tide of populism.

I was blown away by the Korea case study, especially when you talked about the government sending special charter flights to repatriate citizens and their families. It immediately struck me that my own government and a lot of these other western governments really let their own citizens down.

Alden: The Indian government also did that at scale. There were a lot of other countries who were much more active in trying to repatriate their citizens. What was impressive in the South Korean case: it was the family of their citizens as well, whether they were South Korean citizens or not. So South Korea had a very inclusive notion of belonging, and they’re a contrast throughout the book.

The Japanese were the opposite. For considerable periods of the pandemic, if you were a Japanese permanent resident caught abroad, even if you were married to a Japanese citizen, you couldn’t come home. Countries drew the lines in different places about who was welcome and who was not.

Arbitrary rules around belonging tend to set off my racism detector. Is there any way to talk about intelligent borders without talking about racism, ethnonationalism and this fear of the other that clearly spiked during COVID?

Alden: I would strongly argue that you can. One of the striking and instructive things about COVID is that some countries did do things on a basis that I think is reasonable to call ethnonationalism. The use of Title 42 at the U.S. border with Mexico to keep out asylum seekers was that sort of measure. But you had countries like New Zealand and Australia that kept their own citizens out. So this was a broader sort of fear. And again, we are all potentially vulnerable to governments who decide, for reasons that are popular, to close their borders.

The breakdown regarding international cooperation: there’s a temptation to just blame everything on Trump. But it seems like there was much more going on here. What would you attribute that breakdown to, and how much blame can I ascribe to Donald Trump personally?

Trautman: The U.S. often leads and the rest of the world often follows. That doesn’t necessarily apply to places like, you know, South Korea or Japan, but in the North American context, we had a playbook. We had something called the North American Plan for Animal and Pandemic Influenza, or NAPAPI, which really downgraded the use of borders, particularly land borders, to try to control an infectious disease.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that if we’d had a president who was more multilateral, at least in the North American context, that we may have followed that playbook more closely, which would have meant not closing our borders, or at least our land borders with Mexico and Canada.

Alden: The other important point, globally, is that I think China deserves a lot of blame for its initial handling. Part of the International Health Regulations bargain was countries would be very proactive in reporting on outbreaks of novel viruses and, in exchange, the rest of the world wouldn’t cut them off quickly. There was fear that countries would be reluctant to report honestly if they thought their trade and their travel could be affected.

We saw this during the pandemic with the Omicron virus, where the South Africans did superb medical sleuthing to uncover it, reported it to the world, and suddenly Europe, Canada, the United States and others say, we’re not going to let people travel from South Africa. It was a new set of border closures. That was exactly what the health regulations were designed to prevent.

The problem in the case of the outbreak though is that the Chinese weren’t transparent. They didn’t tell the world what was going on. They didn’t tell the WHO what was going on. So by the time the rest of the world figured it out, COVID had spread across a number of places in the world, and the measures to contain it at that point were not nearly as effective as they might have been if the Chinese had reported this promptly.

Trautman: I would add too, in the European case, Europe started out by sort of having this Fortress Europe, where there was a perimeter approach. That pretty quickly broke down, and you had individual countries putting up border closures against their neighbors. That didn’t really have to do with Donald Trump at all. I mean, that was pure nationalistic sentiment on the part of countries that had committed to free movement in a way that no other places in the world had. And even that broke down.

We’re dealing with, I think, a lot of the same concerns now. It feels like there’s a strange little Cold War, trade war brewing or unfolding between the U.S. and Canada. And I wonder if there’s really any hope of strengthening relations enough to where this border becomes more open rather than less over the next few years.

Alden: It’s going to be a struggle, but I think the lessons we take away from the COVID experience are absolutely applicable to the current situation between the United States and Canada. There are a lot of deep cross-border ties between the two countries, and there are communities on both sides of the border that have a very strong interest in maintaining this relationship, 37 states in the United States for whom Canada is their largest export partner.

So one of the hopes is that all of the people who are affected by this in both countries can rise above some of what’s being done at the governmental level — candidly, most of it being done on the U.S. side, from the Trump administration — to find ways to maintain and, where possible, build these cross-border ties.

I worry a little bit when I hear people from B.C. saying, well, we’re not going to come down to Washington state anymore. We have a strong region here. The Cascadia region means something to a lot of people on both sides of the border, and I would be careful to try not to let things going on at the national level destroy those local and regional relationships.

Trautman: I fear that we came out of this time in COVID, where a lot of our connections were weakened and frayed and the trust was kind of disrupted, and we were on our way to building that up, only to get kind of broken down again. It’s hard for me to imagine how we navigate the next four years coming out of the position that we’re in. The only hope is that people continue to advocate for the importance of that relationship.

“With rare short-term exceptions,” you write in the book, “rigid border controls should be understood as a failure.” I’m sure some will see that as controversial. Can you unpack that?

Alden: Most of these problems are better solved by other means. I mean, the notion that the United States is going to go after Canada over fentanyl smuggling. Fentanyl use is not a problem that can be solved at borders. There’s no level of border control that’s going to stop fentanyl or potentially even more serious drugs from moving across borders. You have to deal with the demand problem. Illegal migration, very much the same. So I think in most cases, border controls are an admission of failure. These are problems that are better solved away from the border, and governments use border measures because they failed to address these problems in a meaningful way.

Trautman: Political theatre. Borders are a site of political theatre, and nowhere did we see that more than during COVID.

The Tyee earlier published an excerpt from ‘When the World Closed Its Doors.’