The United States–Canada security community: A case study in mature border management

Canada and the US The United States and Canada have a long tradition of bilateral and binational security coordination, cooperation and collaboration. This is evident in a vast and growing number of transgovernmental networks that facilitate and enable policy alignment and parallelism in defence, border security, intelligence and counter-terrorism. The security community has mastered coordination and cooperation. The US–Canada relationship is based on reciprocity. Despite its common cultural bedrock though, the US–Canada security community's hallmark is policy parallelism. Forms of mature collaboration remain limited and are only found on occasion. Partnerships have proven more successful in functional areas than in principled ones.