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February 4, 2006

Keeping the riff-raff out of the U.S.
By Ross McLennan

"Mr. Bush, tear down that fence, eh?"

--Canadian Prime Minister

Sheila Copps, Jan. 30, 2013

Seven years have passed since January 2006, when Colorado Republican congressman Tom Tancredo predicted the U.S. would build a fence along the border between the U.S. and Canada.

The fence, Tancredo said then, would prove a necessity because a similar structure his country planned to build between itself and Mexico would force illegal immigrants and terrorists to sneak into the U.S. across the Canadian border instead.

Tancredo proved remarkably prescient.

The stream of illegal Mexican immigrants and terrorists across America's southern border became a mere trickle, but the nation was soon overrun by a veritable tsunami of undesirables from Canada.

Now, seven years later, the world's longest fence stretches along what was once known as the world's longest undefended border.

Back in 2006, Mexican President Vicente Fox branded the fence between his country and the U.S. America's Berlin Wall.

No doubt that's what Canadians would have dubbed the fence along their border as well, if not for the media's incessant use of the phrase "Good fences make good neighbours," from Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall.

The CBC's Peter Mansbridge alone has repeated that line 2,567 times since records started being kept six years ago.

They were the dying words of CTV's Lloyd Robertson at the sudden end of his final broadcast last year.

The phrase is ubiquitous: "Good fences make good neighbours ... Good fences make good neighbours ... Good fences make good neighbours."

No wonder Canadians have come to call the fence Frost's F-----' Wall.

Politicians on both sides of the border have also taken to repeat the line ad nauseum.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper, who objected to the fence only because it wasn't called a firewall, most famously used the phrase during his amendment to the Canadian Health Act which allows for private hospitals in gated communities across Canada such as Alberta.

The phrase was also a favourite of his successor, Jack Layton, who supported the fence for quite a different reason: he said it helped keep Americans out of Canada.

George W. Bush, just beginning his fourth term as U.S. president, thanks to the passage the President for Life bill in 2007, has worked to familiarize Americans with the phrase in order to promote the building of the fence as a benign enterprise.

"Good fences make good neighbours" has replaced "In God we trust" on American coins and bills and is displayed in post offices across the country.

Bush has also worked to ensure the phrase would permeate popular culture as well.

In Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, the last thing the dying Kane says as the snow globe slips from his fingers has been changed from "Rosebud" to "Good fences make good neighbours."

The phrase has also replaced the motto "Ars Gratia Artis," which appeared above Leo the MGM lion at the beginning of the defunct studio's movies.

There's no need to go into the phenomenal success of the female rap group Borderz wit Fenzes, whose detractors have labeled "Bush's Bizzos" because they suspect they're funded by government money.

The longest single unbroken portion of the fence stretches across the Prairies where, it's said, not even a bird gets across the border unless U.S. border guards let it.

Manitoba farmer Emile Swakhammer, who lives near the fence, can attest to that.

"Most of the bodies you see left to hang there and rot as an example to others are on the second fence," Swakhammer said.

"Most people make it over the first fence and across the patrol road before they're stopped, usually about half way up the second fence."

According to Swakhammer, many of those who end their lives as crow bait on the fence are Canadian cross-border shoppers eager to spend their $1.35 US loonies in America but frustrated by the time it takes to pass through their local Checkpoint Charlie (the nickname that's been given to every official border crossing).

"They drop before they shop," as Swakhammer put it with grim humour.

"Sadly, they're not all shoppers," he added, referring to the many Canadians found hanging from the fence with crude signs around their necks that read "Wheat Board Commie" or "Socialist Scum."

"So, do good fences make good neighbours?" I asked Swakhammer as we slowly backed away from the border with our hands raised and then headed back to his farmhouse.

"I don't know about good neighbours," he said. "But it's made for a lot of dead ones."

Ross McLennan is a Sun columnist.