South of the border, down America way

America is nothing if not a country devoted to equality. There will be pressure on the government in its efforts to protect its borders to treat its northern boundary with Canada exactly as it does its boundary with Mexico. Already, the passport requirement is in effect at land border crossings and the U.S. has deployed spy drones and other electronic devices to watch for illegal crossings from Canada. No doubt the legislators will demand a fence like the U.S. has between itself and Mexico, although nearly half the boundary between our two countries is under water.

The Department of Homeland Security will have to show that it is spending an equal amount of money defending America's north as it is defending America's south -- in the U.S., equality is measured by money.

Here are the numbers regarding illegal crossings from last year.

Officials apprehended 723,840 people trying to enter the country illegally. Nearly 662,000 were from Mexico. Only 610 were from Canada.

Let's put those numbers in some perspective.

If you put all the illegal entries from Mexico in one urban location, it would rank by population as the 20th largest city in the United States, knocking Baltimore, Maryland down to the 21st spot. If you put the illegal entries from Canada in one place, it would equal the crowd that be can found in one of Toronto's largest downtown nightclub on any Saturday evening.

Do you really need to spend the same money on policing a downtown Toronto nightclub as you do Baltimore?

Now a cynic might say that the reason for the discrepancy in these numbers is because the United States has to date spent a lot more money on resources to catch illegal immigrants from Mexico.

No.

That would be a person who believes that everybody wants to come and live in the United States and that there is no difference in that respect between Mexicans and Canadians. I don't like to burst the bubble of American self-pride, but the vast, vast majority of Canadians have no interest in living in the United States -- visiting yes -- living no. And the few that do want to live there take the legal route and become fully-fledged voting American citizens.

From Canada's perspective, 9/11 was an inside job

It is hard to know what to make of the latest Canadian “ruffled feathers” flap going on over the comments of Janet Napolitano, the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary.

She got herself in trouble in a television interview raising the old chestnut about the 9/11 terrorists getting into the U.S. through Canada. This was said in the context of the U.S. treating the Canadian border exactly the same as the Mexican border.

Early versions of her suggested that she was simply ignorant of the Canadian border situation and her 9/11 attributes bore that out. However, she has since corrected the record to say she was wrong about that and was thinking of the wannabe LAX bomber who was nabbed at the border crossing between British Columbia and Washington State.

Now she has gone on to say that her problem with us is that we let in people that would be denied entry into the United States. In short, we need to be more selective. Her predecessor, Michael Chertoff, claimed that more than a dozen “extremists” were caught trying to cross from Canada.

Maybe instead of puffing ourselves up as not being a problem we should take a little more time to talk to our counterparts in the U.S. to find out exactly what they know that we apparently do not.

I cross the border two or three times a year, and I would not want to see some unduly militarized bureaucratic operation replacing the current one. However, we should be cooperating with the U.S. on weeding out the undesirables as much as we can and if we are not willing to do that then I suppose we will suffer the consequences.

I am inclined to give Ms. Napolitano the benefit of the doubt at this stage and assume that she has some good data to back up her policy utterances.