Rock With Nova Scotia in 2010

“Well, some of the 9-11 hijackers did come through Canada, as you know.”

- Senator John MacCain on Fox News

Two American heavyweights are flapping a tired myth again: the fact that some of the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 attacks came through the Canadian border. Within 24 hours they both pulled back on the comment but the cows are already out of the barn. And most Americans still believe that Canada  is a launching pad for Al Quaeda. And this hurts tourism.

The new head of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, is the latest one to suggest that the 9-11 terrorists came to the U.S. via Canada and now John McCain, a man I deeply admire, said the same thing on Fox News. Now, we all remember the idiots on a Fox program that basically  called the Canadian military a vacation army.” That was on the same day that 4 Canadians died in Afghanistan. In fact, Canadian soldiers seem to be the only ones dying there these days.

Now everyone knows that Fox news is the Captain Kangaroo of news shows, but many Americans believe their reports. In fact a large portion of “well-educated” Americans think that Canada is a landing strip for Al Qaeda.

The problem for we Canadians sharing one of the longest borders in the world with the U.S. is like an elephant sleeping with a gerbil. They both like each other but the gerbil feels every twitch the elephant makes.

One of the biggest twitches is always trade. As Canadians we do not have financial might to demand fairplay we can only suggest it. This is why whenever anything goers bad in the U.S. economy the fix-all for the American Congress is to be protectionist. They claim Canada subsidizes agriculture (The U.S. farmer gets more breaks than Canadian one) and softwood lumber.

It’s the strong U.S. dollar. So, devalue it, you may say. No, they put a quarantine on Canadian wood that bankrupted many Canadian operators and caused American homebuilders to pay as much as 25% on America-grown lumber because American producers couldn’t keep up with the demand. Closing borders is bad for both sides.

I. hope Ms. Napolitano learns her job quickly because every remark like that hurts Nova Scotia tourism. I mean, who wants to visit a country that harbors your enemies?

However, like a Canadian security expert said about remarks like this:

“The fact that terrorists came through Canada was disproven by the 9-11 Commission. They said emphatically that the perpetrators came into the U.S. from outside North America.

“However, if they had landed in Canada first, we didn’t let them into the U.S. That would have been the job of the U.S. border officials. And we sure as hell never taught them to fly airplanes. They learned that in American flying schools.”