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More police and border guards have been sent to remote areas well away from official crossing points. Small border communities, often little more than hubs for local farms, are having to establish shelters for those who arrive with only what they can carry. Private citizens are awoken in the dead of night by migrants knocking on their doors, asking if they’re in Canada and if they can come in out of the cold.

This is not a crisis, yet. It seems to be currently straddling a position somewhere between an inconvenience and a novelty, at least for those whose fields aren’t now transit corridors. But this is also happening in the dead of winter. The crossing will only get easier and more tempting as spring arrives and the weather warms. The trickle may turn into a flood.

There’s a small chance the currently hazy future of so many non-citizens living in the U.S. might clear up before then, convincing the thousands, or hundreds of thousands, who might now be pondering a northern exodus that it’s safe to stay where they are. But for the first time in generations, there is a real possibility of a genuine crisis on our undefended border with the United States. This is something the federal government must be preparing for. The sooner, the better.

Preparedness and the preservation of public order is the most fundamental mandate of any government. Canada, for almost 150 years now a land of peace and plenty with a powerful and friendly neighbour, has had the luxury of not worrying much about that. We take stability and peace so utterly for granted that we often think of government now as merely a somewhat inefficient but mostly harmless redistributor of wealth and provider of certain public services (and many of them we could just as easily live without).