The community of Point Roberts, Washington, is facing social catastrophe and economic collapse. It may be 400 miles or so west of the Idaho line, but it has some lessons worth absorbing a state away.
It is a highly unusual place, a small spit of land on the Puget Sound, northwest of Bellingham, and on the Canadian border. It is part of the United States – the border runs on its north side – but the only land connection is with British Columbia. It is bounded on the other three sides by water, and there is no significant port or airport. People there who need to get in or out, or get what they need (including education for most school students), have to pass through the border with Canada, drive a half hour or so, and then cross the border back into the United States at Blaine.
This makes Point Roberts highly sensitive to relations between the United States and Canada. Through generations, those have tended to be good, and the unusual conditions at Point Roberts have not been especially onerous.
Until this year.
Business at Point Roberts long has centered heavily on traffic and tourists from Canada, and those have nearly disappeared. An article in the New Republic pointed out, “Point Roberts can’t survive without Canadian visitors—and the Canadians aren’t coming. The thousands that would normally pop in over the weekend for some cheap gas and a burger by the ocean have answered the call for ‘Elbows Up’ – the Canadian equivalent of ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ – and are keeping their dollars at home.”
Point Roberts is an unusual and extreme case. But that allows you to see the border dynamics more clearly. And those dynamics are kicking in to the east in Idaho, right now.
To see it, travel (as I recently did) to Boundary County, which as its name suggests borders on Canada. Idaho has two international border crossings, at Porthill and Eastport, and both long have seen steady traffic. A significant number of Canadians for generations have driven south to Bonners Ferry, the nearest city center, and Sandpoint, and sometimes beyond, to take advantage of shopping and tourism and more.
Bonners Ferry has grown considerably in the last couple of decades. Its downtown seems less busy than back then (though it’s not a depressed area), but the bench area to the south has attracted a lot of new businesses. Bonners Ferry long struck me as a place almost without national chains, but a bunch of them have sprouted there in the last few years. Immigrants from other states, boosting the area population, probably contributed to that. And the Kootenai tribal casino still seems to be doing good business.
What I didn’t see at Bonners Ferry was Canadian license plates – as in, any, not a single one. In my past visits there over the decades, plates from Canada always accounted for a sizable portion of parking use and street traffic. Not this time.
The story was similar to the south in Sandpoint. The artsy downtown was busy and the area is still growing – lots of transplants from California, evidently – but here too Canadians, based on license plate visibility, seemed to be absent.
Neither place, to reiterate, is crashing economically as Point Roberts is, at least not now. Boundary and Bonner counties are not that dependent on Canadian traffic.
But that traffic long has been a significant part of the local economy, and if it continues to stay away, that likely will have some long-term effects.
Not least, it could cement a growing reputation of the Idaho Panhandle as a place closed to people from elsewhere unless you belong to, ahem, certain groups of people who would be welcomed in the Redoubt.
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