Canadians Are Laughing At Ramaswamy’s Proposal For a US-Canadian Border Wall: ‘Completely Nuts’

AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack

Among the wild statements made by presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy during Wednesday’s GOP debate was the proposal to build a wall not on just the southern border of the United States, but the northern one it shares with Canada. And some Canadian experts are calling it “ludicrous,” “completely nuts,” and a whole host of other things.

One of Ramaswamy’s strategies for getting people to vote for him/hate him/cover him in the press is doubling-down or one-upping ideas, similar to Penelope, a character played by Kristen Wiig on Saturday Night Live who would take what one person said and claim something bigger.

So when the candidate proposed during the debate that the United States should not just “build the wall, build both walls” to stop the flow of fentanyl coming in from the North, it wasn’t that surprising, but it was widely shot down by some Canadians experts. (U.S. Customs and Border Patrol reported only 2.43 lbs of fentanyl seized at the Northern border during the 2023 fiscal year, which amounts to less than 1 percent of what is seized at the Southern border.)

The US-Canadian border is the world’s longest at 5,500 miles, so the cost alone would be massive. The BBC’s Bernd Debusman Jr. spoke to a few experts about the proposal, and they dismissed it across the board:

Aaron Ettinger, Professor of US and Canadian foreign policy at Ottowa’s Carleton University said:

From a politicking perspective, it might be a good way to draw in right-wing voters in upstate New York, Vermont, in the northeast or in rural states across the prairies. It might be an effective way of showing that this guy is interested in ‘our’ border, which is kind of the ‘other’ border. …

There might be some electoral method to the madness. But to anybody who knows anything about the policies, it’s ludicrous.

Jason Kenney, former Alberta Premier and MP who also served as Minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism and later Minister of Defence:

Building such a wall is completely, obviously unfeasible. Doing so would likely take decades and cost at least hundreds of billions of dollars. I have never heard a single American national security official or expert suggest a northern border wall, because they all know that it would be a catastrophic waste of resources without a significant improvement in border security.

Kenney added that the idea was “completely nuts.” Which means that we’ll likely hear Ramaswamy continue to talk about it in public, something Kenney also predicts: “[I]t is part of his effort to be as ridiculously provocative as possible.”