MAGA: protecting the homeland from Canadian bookworms
A dispatch from the library that straddles the US-Canada border
STRADDLING THE border between Canada and America is the Haskell Free Library and Opera House. It serves two places—Stanstead in Canada’s Quebec province and Derby Line in Vermont—which are one community. The twin towns also share water and sewerage systems. For more than a century the library was an example of America’s special friendship with its neighbour. Not only did the pair once have the longest undefended border in the world, they shared books.
Once a patron enters the library, the only indication that they are in Canada is a thin black line delineating the border, which runs diagonally across the foyer, the children’s reading room and through the book stacks. A small opera house sits on the library’s second storey. The stage is in Canada. Most of the audience sits in America, though a handful of audience members have a foot in both countries (there’s a metaphor here somewhere). The front door of the library is in America. Canadians used to be able to walk across the border with little fuss to get to it. No longer.
Thanks to new restrictions placed by President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, Canadians are allowed through that door only if they first check-in with border patrol agents a few streets away. Until October 1st, library cardholders coming from Canada may still walk across the border to use the front door. After that anyone in Canada will have to enter through a converted emergency exit to enter the library. Kristi Noem, America’s secretary of homeland security, visited the library in March. According to the library’s director, she stepped back and forth across the border in the library. “The 51st state!,” she announced when she stepped into Canada.
This is the latest episode in a slow hardening of the border that began after September 11th, 2001. Big metal gates turned residential streets that once led into Canada into dead-ends, causing headaches for snowploughs and the fire brigades. One apartment building is so close to the border that residents must check in with border patrol to put their children on the school bus, which stops next to the border checkpoint. Sylvie Boudreau, head of the library’s board of trustees, is a former Canadian border agent. She is sympathetic to America’s wish to control crossings. But the one high-profile smuggling case cited by the Trump administration took place over a decade ago. And it involved guns being smuggled into Canada.
Kelly Brennan, a Canadian patron, was not thrilled about entering through the back door instead of the grand foyer. Her son was tickled that the toilet was in America. “Hey Mom, I just went to the bathroom in the States.” Local officials of Derby Line and Stanstead have held joint meetings to discuss the changes. “Our friends live across the street, and we don’t think of them as being in another country,” says Sarah Webster, a Derby Line official. Jody Stone, mayor of Stanstead, says “we are still the same people, and we want to continue to have that good relationship”.
Some Derby Line residents (the Vermonters) have hoisted Canadian flags in front of their homes or stuck maple-leaf signs on their lawns. But some Canadians are boycotting and booing all things American. “A lot of Americans are pretty alarmed by Trump’s sort of antagonism towards Canada. I think a lot of Americans were pretty shocked to hear Canadians boo the anthem,” says Asa McKercher, an expert in Canada-US relations at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.
On the other, western, side of the continent, the Peace Arch Park, which straddles Washington State and British Columbia, was once a similar symbol of close relations. Since 2024 Canadians must check in with America’s border patrol to access the Washington side of the park. “We have proven that you can secure a border by working together,” says Laurie Trautman of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University. “But once you put these borders up, they’re really hard to tear down.” ■