Two weeks ago, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and American President Barack Obama announced new plans to streamline and facilitate trade across the borders of their two countries. While this type of movement may be new to businesses, it’s a familiar reality to those who live along the border.
Having lived my entire life in Sarnia, Ontario, a small city that borders Port Huron, Michigan, it’s still hard for me to conceptualize the United States as a “foreign country.” There are a variety of ways most McGill students are probably familiar with Sarnia: they think it has something to do with an evil White Witch and a talking lion named Aslan, they’ve driven through it and over its bridges on their way to or from the U.S., or, most likely, they recognize it as Michael Moore’s familiar Canadian counterpoint in the films Bowling for Columbine and Sicko. We also had a brief stint as the “Kissing Capital of the World,” thanks to the Guinness Book of World Records, and the area is popularly known as “the chemical valley,” thanks to the profusion of chemical, oil, and gas refineries that form the bulk of the town’s economy.
If you’ve never spent time in a border community like Sarnia or Windsor, you might not realize how connected the two countries are. At the risk of sounding like another high-school cheerleader from a borderland, I can literally see the United States from my house. You’d be hard pressed to find a child in any of the area schools, on both sides of the St. Clair River, who hasn’t asked their parents at some point why they had to drive over the bridge, when swimming across the 100 metre-wide river would just make so much more sense. Many people commute from Ontario to Michigan for work, particularly nurses, varsity and club sports teams often compete against each other, babies are born in American hospitals, and sick Americans come to Sarnia for care (as immortalized by Moore in Sicko). The Americans love our casino, and we love their cheap gas and alcohol. It’s a wonderful two-way relationship.
While Detroit may no longer be the booming Motor City it once was, it’s still home to five professional sports teams, major concert venues, great independent restaurants seriously lacking in small town Ontario, and a surprisingly impressive museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts. Most importantly, however, there’s Target. The reality is that shopping is simply better in the U.S., from food (mostly because of Trader Joe’s) to cheaper books. With Detroit only 45 minutes away, compared to Toronto’s three hours, there’s very little reason for us to travel there.
Other than the shopping, one of the major benefits of living in a border community on the Canadian side is the availability of radio and television free from CRTC regulations. This means when I go home I get to listen to classic rock other than the Tragically Hip and Rush, can avoid shows like Dan for Mayor, Heartland, and Intelligence, and most importantly, get to watch American Super Bowl commercials.
The biggest differences between the two countries are food and weapons. Stop at a McDonald’s only 20 minutes over the border, between Port Huron and Detroit, the heart of Michigan militia country, and you’ll find not only that an American medium coffee is the size of a Canadian extra large, and you can’t get milk, only cream, to go in it, but also a parking lot full of pickup trucks with gun racks in the beds.
In addition to culturally and socially, the southern Ontario borderlands are more closely tied to Detroit than Toronto economically. The heavy industry, oil refineries, rubber factories, and auto plants of the Sarnia-Windsor corridor are mirror images of the Rust Belt Midwest. These intimate ties, while great in the middle of the 20th century, are admittedly a problem today, with the Windsor-Sarnia area having the second worst unemployment rate in Ontario. Any economic recovery plans for the areas will necessarily have to be cross-border in focus and reach as well, recognizing the reality of interconnectedness.
To my friend and fellow editor from “Toronto,” (read: Thornhill) who takes every opportunity to remind me that, “there is no Ontario outside of the GTA,” I will say this: we don’t care about you either. Toronto may think it’s the centre of the world, but those in the borderlands of the province know that despite a tough economy, they still have the best of both worlds.
