The creation of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) in 2003 marks an attempt to integrate all of Canada’s various border-controlling agencies and acts under one enforcement organization; it’s function is to provide “integrated border services that support national security and public safety priorities and facilitate the movement of persons and goods.” In taking on this role, the agency presents two spatial configurations of Canada’s interaction at the global scale. The first narrative is a vision of a globally integrated Canada with respect to economic and market policy. This order corresponds to a Canada that depends on the proliferation of free trade agreements and fuller integration into the global economic sphere for its prosperity. The second narrative is the familiar configuration of spatially bound vulnerability and uncertainty in which the safe interior must be protected from the dangerous exterior. This paper is an attempt to unpack some of the significances associated with the stories told by the CBSA, the methods of risk management which are deployed to quell the concern raised by them, and the implication that these strategies have for repressing other narratives that could be told about the problematic nature of state sovereignty and the associated singular Canadian identity. I demonstrate that through the use of risk mitigation practices associated with a liberal governmentality, the CBSA not only attempts to mitigate the contradiction of a prosperous uncertainty but also secures what Rob Walker has identified as the conventional account of a centered and homogeneous political space. I argue here that the use of risk management strategies in Canada’s bordering practices provides the illusion of an ontological security, offering up solutions to the contradictions that would otherwise threaten this notion of a homogeneous Canadian identity.

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Christopher Alderson
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