The U.S. government is proposing to charge a new fee for every vehicle or pedestrian crossing the U.S.-Canada border — an idea that has prompted fierce objections from New York lawmakers who claim the levy would stifle transboundary commerce and undermine recent efforts to ease the flow of people and goods between the two countries.

The Canadian government, too, is raising alarms about the proposal, with an embassy spokesman in Washington telling the Buffalo News that “we’re confident that any study would conclude that the considerable economic damage any fee would do would greatly outweigh any revenue generated.”

The issue flared on Friday in the U.S. after Rep. Brian Higgins, a Democratic congressman from Buffalo, N.Y., drew attention to an item buried deeply in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s proposed 2014 budget, released last week by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.

Exactly how and where such a fee would be collected, whether it would focus on those entering or leaving the U.S. — or both — and how much each crossing might cost each traveller have not been determined.

But Higgins slammed the fee idea as “the absolute last thing we should be doing” at a time when both the U.S. and Canada are working to streamline cross-border movements, even as the countries’ respective border-security regimes aim to strengthen monitoring and enforcement along the 8,900-kilometre binational frontier.

Higgins has also suggested that a crossing fee at the Canada-U.S. border would be used to unfairly “subsidize” the more expensive and challenging security operations required along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Department of Homeland Security budget blueprint proposes to “conduct a study assessing the feasibility and cost relating to establishing and collecting a land border crossing fee for both land border pedestrians and passenger vehicles along the northern and southwest borders of the United States.”

The study, to be completed within nine months, would explore “the feasibility of collecting from existing operators on the land border such as bridge commissions, toll operators, commercial passenger bus, and commercial passenger rail.”

It would also identify the investments necessary to collect the fee “at land ports of entry where existing capability is not present,” and probe whether there are “any legal and regulatory impediments to establishing and collecting a land border crossing fee.”

In a written statement about the proposed budget, submitted by Napolitano ahead of her appearance last week at the House of Representatives homeland security committee, she said her department needed to find fresh revenue streams through fees to hire new border guards and to support increasingly expensive operations at international crossing points.

“Processing the more than 350 million travellers annually provides nearly $150 billion in economic stimulus, yet the fees that support these operations have not been adjusted in many cases for more than a decade,” Napolitano stated. “As the complexity of our operations continues to expand, the gap between fee collections and the operations they support is growing, and the number of workforce hours fees support decreases each year.”