1) The document discusses how Canadian law conceptualizes borders and bordering through legal tools and court decisions. It examines how borders are framed as both static territorial lines but also shifting and expanding spaces. 2) New legal approaches to borders include programs operating at multiple scales from binational to regional to municipal. Competing legal interpretations also result in inconsistent bracketing of border issues. 3) The expansion of bordering into new venues and technologies has limited individual mobility and access to rights, while physical borders still demarcate state sovereignty. The document proposes that borders can be understood through their topological "expanding and contracting" effects.

1. B/ordering Canada
New legal tools to extend the post-9/11 border
JOSHUA LABOVE

2. How does the law border?
How does the Charter provide a legal bracket through which to consider the prospects
and possibilities of borderwork and what does the application of the Charter tell us
about how borders work in the Canadian legal space?
What kind of legal space
is a border?

3. How do judges and the courts make borders?
What are the limits—within legal praxis and convention—that govern the way borders need
to be conceptualised and performed? What sorts of legal distinctions frame the way
borderwork can be performed in Canada?

4. Canadian LegalTools at the Border
Courts and judges face an ongoing tension to place borders and borderings within Canadian
jurisdiction, while imagining new extra-legal applications of borders that envision the border
as a liminal space.
Security Certificates
National security-based deportation program for non-citizens
2
1
Shiprider Program
Bi-national patrol of the coastal areas in the US-Canada borderlands
3
4
Expanded use of immigration detention
Detention conditions that mirrors criminal practices
Stationing of consular/visa officers abroad
Intercepting/preempting refugee claims before they reach Canada

5. Static and Shifting Approaches
Is the border constantly at move? How do legal actors frame the way borders work?
The Westphalian world-view where the
border is a fixed line that is entwined with the
limits of sovereign power.
The Static Border
The Shifting Border
Or is the border divorced from the
cartographic edge of the territory, a shifting
and evolving space that can extend beyond
—and go far within the physical boundary
line?

6. New Scales of Border Work
The border can no longer be conceptualized as simply a line dividing two nations;
often, bordering is occurring at a range of scales.
ALL CONTRIBUTING TO A MODERN BORDER
Programs like Shiprider are
binational between the US and
Canada but devolve significant
planning and implementation
direction to particular regions with
their own interests and foci.
Binational w/ Regional Focus
Trusted traveller programs like
NEXUS push the border out, at once
to a transnational and as well
biometric scale. NEXUS makes use
of ‘information sharing’ to envision a
North American security perimeter.
Transnational Regional MunicipalNational/Federal
The classic representation of the
border, federally managed, is still
alive and active.
From environment & resource
development to First Nations issues,
regions like ‘Cascadia’ and ‘Niagara’
are working to take on border work.
Cities are attempting to do border
work, both to promote their
economic viability in global trade and
through amnesty/sanctuary city
policies.

7. Multiple Borderings
Rather than speak of a wholesale extraction of the static border to further remote
spaces, we can see the expansion of bordering through the emergence of three
characteristics of the law at the border
…
NEW APPROACHES
Is the border a static line that
can be pointed to or is it a
shifting, performative, series of
practices and policies?
NEW SCALES
In addition to border work
at the level of the nation-
state, bordering can be
conceptualized as a
project for cities, counties,
regions, and transnational
partnerships.
COMPETING
BRACKETED EFFECTS
Legal decision-making demands
‘bracketing off’ questions of
jurisprudence from the performance or
enactment of real-world spaces and
transactions. What is bracketed, how,
and to why are hardly consistent.

8. Bordering as a 'TopologicalTwist’
When multiple border policies and tools are at work at once, we may need another
axis to conceptualize the look and feel of the border
Can ‘expanding’ and ‘contracting’ describe
the spatial extent of bordering?
Border work is expanding in to new venues, coupled with new technologies of
surveillance to further connect border-work and security making post-9/11.
Still, physical borders seem to matter, as states, Canada being no exception,
guard and protect the edge of the territory.
Ad-hoc bordering creates a dangerous chaos for migrants in particular, who
find their mobility is limited and their access to Constitutional protections
challenged by evolving legal understandings of what and where bordering can
occur.

9. Contact Me
I’m all ears and keen to chat.
TWITTER
@jlabove
•
EMAIL
jlabove@sfu.ca
ONTHE WEB
www.sfu.ca/~jlabove

10. ThankYou
for your interest and feedback, and
to Ruben Zaiotti and the Dalhousie University European Centre for Excellence