U. S., Canada should join forces to build a greater Niagara region
Creating a binational community
It was September of 2000—a year before the catastrophic events of Sept. 11, 2001— and talk of forging closer economic ties between communities in Western New York and Southern Ontario was on the upswing.
That September, I was working on a feature article for a magazine in Ontario’s Niagara region about Buffalo, its architectural and cultural riches, and its efforts to reclaim the great prosperity it enjoyed before the loss of industry to countries where they pay slave wages, and the flight of people to the suburbs took its toll in the last half of the 20th century.
Doug Draper is a Canadian journalist living in Ontario’s Niagara region.
One of the most enthusiastic people I interviewed was Buffalo’s then mayor, Anthony Masiello. He welcomed the opportunity to promote his city for a magazine that had a pretty good circulation in Ontario. But he was just as eager to discuss his interest in pulling together some kind of “cross-border task force” to build what he called a city-region.
“Pardon me, Mr. Mayor, but what do you mean by a city-region?” I asked. He responded that he was talking about a broader region of cities and towns that intersected the international border and stretched as far west and north as Hamilton and the Greater Toronto Area, and at least as far east as Rochester in his state.
This city-region—what some of us on the Ontario side of the border have come to refer to as a “greater Niagara region”—would be home to more than 8 million people where the communities and bridges crossing and sharing the shores of the Niagara River would be the gateway and middle ground. Working together, Masiello insisted, such a region could open doors to more opportunities for all of its people as an economic powerhouse on the continent.
The following June, he was one of a number of mayors from both sides of the border to join a two-day gathering of government, business, academic and community leaders in his city and in Niagara Falls, Ont., for what was billed as the first-ever New York-Ontario Economic Summit, bearing a slogan that read: “building on partnerships.”
The purpose of this summit, according to a joint statement by then New York Gov. George E. Pataki and then Ontario Premier Mike Harris, was “to foster an open and productive exchange of ideas on common issues and challenges, and to discuss opportunities for providing greater cross-border trade and economic growth. The dialogue begun here will strengthen ongoing mutual efforts to build a healthy, competitive and vibrant economy on both sides of the border.”
Gary Burroughs, whose tenure as lord mayor of Niagara stretches back to those times, remembers the sense of optimism he and so many others felt at the summit as Pataki and Harris signed a “memorandum of understanding,” calling on public-and private- sector leaders on both sides of the border to work more closely together to make something akin to the vision Masiello framed a year earlier happen.
“But the summit was only a few months before 9/11,” added Burroughs in a recent interview, “and, of course, the world changed.”
Things sure did change. It seemed
like almost anything that had to do with building closer binational ties went into a state of remission in the months and years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and any and all talk by Canadian and U. S. diplomats of a more seamless border vaporized as the focus shifted to tightening security. For most of us who live near the border and cross it regularly for any one of a variety of reasons — to visit friends, shop or go to a festival, show or football game — the experience of rarely being asked to show a driver’s license at the border was replaced by gridlock at our bridge crossing as customs and immigration officers were being pressed to scrutinize virtually everybody.
It didn’t help the officers’ job or anybody, including businesses dependent on cross-border tourists and others, that some of our politicians and media, including a television news magazine as time-honored as CBS’s “60 Minutes,” were spreading falsehoods that some of the terrorists who slammed the jets into the Pentagon and World Trade Center entered the United States through Canada when, in fact, none of them did.
It has also never helped to have circus barkers posing as news commentators like Lou Dobbs on CNN ranting about “illegal aliens” and the need for ever-tighter border security while hardly ever differentiating between the border his country shares with Canada, and the one it shares with Mexico, where most of the issues involving the illegal flood of people and drugs across the border are apparently occurring. But despite all this, not all was lost for those in our region with a vision of building greater binational ties.
Patrick Robson, who shared the vision of a binational region while he was working as a director of corporate strategy for the regional government in Niagara, Ontario, in 2001 and is still interested in moving it forward as a commissioner for government, said 9/11 never extinguished the interest of people on the Ontario side of the border to reach out to the other side.
Robson recalls one of many episodes of extending a hand in the days after 9/11 where radio stations in Niagara, Ontario, set a goal of raising $30,000 to help the victims of the terrorist attacks. “Within 24 hours, they raised $300,000,” representing about one third of the donations raised across all of Canada during the same period of time. “I’m not saying that makes us more generous than other Canadians,” Robson said, “but it goes to show what a keen affinity we have for our American neighbors.”
That spirit survived in the efforts of at least a handful of organizations to keep governments, businesses and others on both sides of the border working together, said Kathryn Friedman, a deputy director of the University at Buffalo’s Regional Institute studying opportunities for more productive binational relations.
“There is a perception [post 9/11] that no progress has been made,” said Friedman. But there are groups like the Binational Tourism Alliance, made up of more than 140 public-and private- sector members on both sides of the border promoting the larger region as a tourist destination, and the Niagara 10, comprising the heads of the Erie and Niagara county councils, the regional councils in Niagara, Ontario, and the councils of seven city and town councils bordering both sides of the Niagara River, that have continued promoting binational interests.
This coming weekend, just as one example, the BTA will be hosting its eighth annual Doors Open Niagara, inviting residents on both sides of the border to tour many of the area’s heritage, architectural and historical sites free of charge. (Visit www.doorsopenniagara.com or call 1-888-849-5834 for details.) “Open Doors is very symbolic. It is something that helps bring us closer together,” said BTA Director Arlene White of an event that now has more than 12,000 people flowing back and forth across the border each year to visit the sites.
White has the support of Niagara, Ontario, regional councillors like Rob Gabriel, who has been a longtime advocate of “opening the doors wider” between communities on his side and those in Erie and Niagara counties and beyond.
Earlier this month, Gabriel and others listened as the regional council’s chairman, Peter Partington, outlined three priorities for this last year of the council’s four-year term. The first he mentioned is building closer ties with the region’s cross-border neighbors. “There needs to be a greater recognition of Niagara as a strategic gateway and border crossing,” Partington said. “We are within a few hours’ drive of some of the largest markets in North America. Industry can access these markets by air, land or sea, providing us with a huge competitive advantage over other jurisdictions. We are just starting to get that message out.”
In that spirit, Damian Goulbourne, the mayor of Welland, a city that’s had more than its share of industrial job losses over the past few years, has led delegations of municipal, business and academic representatives to Rochester recently. The groups have met with Mayor Robert Duffy to discuss ways that businesses on both sides of the border could benefit from a greater Niagara region.
If, as Goulbourne explains, a business or industry in Rochester or Buffalo or North Tonawanda can purchase services or parts it needs from a business in Welland, St. Catharines or Fort Erie (or vice versa) rather than halfway around the world, why not work more closely to do it and keep more jobs and money here?
“We have got to stop looking at the border as a barrier and start looking to our cross-border neighbors for opportunities to work together for the benefit of all,” said Goulbourne, who is looking forward to having Rochester’s mayor visit Niagara this fall to continue discussions.
Of course, goods and people are not going to flow across the border in a way that will make a greater Niagara region flourish unless something more is done to ease what the Ontario Chamber of Commerce described in a recent report as the border delays or “choke-points” at our bridge crossings.
Brent Gallaugher, a manager for the Canada- U. S. Niagara Falls Bridge Commission, said federal agencies and others in both countries have to work more closely with bridge operators on strategies to reduce delays, including getting the word out to citizens on both sides of the border about passports, enhanced driver’s licenses, NEXUS cards or whatever other documentation they may need to make their crossing easier.
But it will take more than a handful of agencies meeting more regularly over border-crossings issues to launch the city-region Masiello spoke so passionately about a decade ago.
Friedman said what is needed is a larger body of players on both sides of the border — politicians, business and academic leaders and others — to move the idea of a greater Niagara region forward. The structure of the body, she said, should be a matter of “careful deliberation” that considers all concerns either side may have about potentially creating another level of government that supersedes the policies and decision-making authority of local policies and agencies.
On another cautionary note, there are always concerns over what closer ties between the two countries might do to those policies and principles Canadians and Americans don’t necessarily want to share vis-a-vis health care, gun control and other issues.
Fiona McMurran, of Welland, is chairwoman of the South Niagara Chapter of the Council of Canadians, the largest citizens’ organization in the country dedicated to protecting Canadians’ independence. She said the idea of Canadians working together with their American neighbors to improve their collective lot seems like a good one but “it must be remembered that the international border is not simply a formality.”
Paraphrasing a line by the late Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, for Canada, living next to the United States is in some ways like a mouse sleeping next to an elephant, where the mouse “is affected by every twitch.” McMurran added, “However much we may want to cozy up to the elephant, there are still a lot of differences between us and we have to wonder how much the mouse is going to win.”
Yet despite our differences, there have been sterling examples where people, along with governments and businesses on both sides of the border, have worked together for the good of all.
In the 1980s, environmental agencies in both countries, at the urging of their citizens, signed a “declaration of intent” to reduce the flow from leaky dumps and industrial pipes of toxic chemicals that threatened the health of the Niagara River and Lake Ontario. The actions both sides took in response to that declaration set us on a path to protecting and restoring those vital shared resources for generations to come.
There seems no reason why we can’t also come together collectively as a greater Niagara region to advance our economic, cultural and environmental interests for the benefit of all of our citizens.
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