A recent report on CITC-TV, a Global network affiliate in Calgary, outlined a situation on the Mon-tana/Alberta border that is causing a lot of concern along the entire U.S./Canadian border.
There is a gravel road that separates Canada from the United States and more specifically, Toole County, Montana from the rural municipality of Warner No. 5 in Alberta. The Toole County seat is Shelby, where American farmers protested Canadian wheat coming into the United States in the late 1990s.
The people of Warner No. 5 and Toole County, nearly all ranchers, have put all that behind them and have been good neighbors to each other for the past 30 years. Recently, however, a memo from the Department of Homeland Security told local law enforcement that to stop the flow of drugs into the United States from Canada, that gravel road that is the border, is now off limits to any Canadian, even if they live right next to it.
From a legal standpoint, the road was built on the American side a long time ago and several Alberta ranchers have used that road to get access to their property. Now, they will apparently be arrested if they are caught on that 30-mile stretch of gravel road because it’s on the U.S. side.
This situation has numerous implications, not only for Montana and Alberta, but for North Dakota and Manitoba and others as well.
Those of us who live near the Canadian border know full and well that drugs coming across that border are quite rare. Once in a great while some knucklehead will try to smuggle marijuana into the country, but hard drugs into rural Montana?
Here’s the thing. Everyone in Warner No. 5 and Toole County know each other and if someone or something suspicious was going on like an unusual car on that road or strange activity in one of the border communities, local law enforcement would be alerted.
The same can be said about a road that borders Pembina County and the rural municipalities of Montcalm and Rhineland in Manitoba. In this case, the road is actually on the Canadian side and although it’s been the subject of controversy for years, many Pembina County residents use that 30-mile gravel road.
That controversy stems from Pembina River flooding. Canadians built the farm-to-market road, but American officials say it’s a dike to only protect Manitoba farmland.
In case you don’t know, the towns of Neche, North Dakota and Gretna, Manitoba are less than 2 miles apart and there is a lot of commerce between these two small communities. Based on what is about to happen in Toole County, Montana, Manitoba officials could just as well shut off the border road with Pembina County that would effectively force people from the Neche area to have to make longer trips to either go west and south to Walhalla and back north then east or south and east to Pembina back north and then west to their destinations.
There are other similar situations like this brewing along the U.S./Canada border with most of them being along the Washington/British Columbia border.
And that’s perhaps where Homeland Security should focus there attention. Seattle and Vancouver are both big cities, close together and there have been a lot of drug seizures along that stretch of border. Buffalo and Toronto are close together, Detroit and Windsor are as well. And in most cases, if and when drugs are coming into the U.S. from Canada, it’s going to happen on a waterway, not along some lonely rural road in remote northern Montana.
There are, however, other areas where someone could conceal themselves well. They include the Lake of the Woods area, parts of western New York, the entire Maine/New Brunswick border and nearly all of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, not this part of Montana where there is no place for cover or concealment.
Local law enforcement knows this yet they are being mandated to make these drastic changes that are completely unnecessary and will most likely affect the commerce between Warner, Alberta and Shelby, Montana and quite possibly between Neche, North Dakota and Gretna, Manitoba.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
