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It was so obviously a violation of our sovereignty, to say nothing of common sense, to let this persist. Yet the Liberals seemed to get a kick out of the Conservatives crying foul against it – never let a cheap shot excuse to call someone racist go to waste! – that they not only kept it open but sadistically sent in a brigade of federal police to assist in the violation of federal laws that those officers were otherwise tasked with enforcing. Talk about demoralizing the troops.

And so it took the wildfire spread of the coronavirus to do what regular politics couldn’t and force the closure of Roxham Road. It was just absurd of the Liberals to announce a near total closure of the U.S. border but to say, as they first did, that they’d still keep the illegal crossing open. The only caveat was that they’d house the crossers in quarantine for two weeks.

Then Trudeau changed his mind, after first talking over logistics with Washington, and announced that after three years, Roxham Road was finally wrapping up. There you go. Proof that this was always possible; it was just a matter of political will.

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This little episode tells us something else though, something bigger: That in our current moment, the idea of the “post-national state” is laughable, it’s dead, and that borders matter again.

If there were no borders, if there were no nations, then the coronavirus would be all but unmanageable. Can you imagine a global body like the United Nations or European Union attempting to roll out and enforce social distancing measures? This is like when Stalin and Mao attempted to micromanage crop yields in small towns from afar (spoiler alert: they failed).