What Canada Thinks About Building Wall on Border

ByJORDYN PHELPS ABCNews logo
Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Scott Walker said in an NBC interview published Sunday that the idea of building a wall along the U.S. border with Canada is a "legitimate issue" worth reviewing, when asked about the potential risk of terrorists using unpatrolled borders to cross into the United States undetected.

So we wondered, what does Canada think of the idea of constructing a wall along the longest shared land border in the world?

A spokesperson for the Canadian Embassy responded to ABC News with this fact: "No terrorists have been successful in attacking the United States coming through the Canadian border."

Christine Constantin, the spokesperson for embassy, points out that "all the terrorists responsible for 9/11 were in the United States with visas issued by the U.S. government."

"The Canada-US Border is jointly managed through strong information sharing and intelligence cooperation between our two countries," Constantine continued, listing off a laundry list of shared intelligence gathering techniques that includes automated visa information sharing and a shared log of non-citizens who cross along the shared U.S.- Canada border.

And in between the official entry border crossing points, Constantine said there are joint Canadian-US law enforcement teams that share intelligence across land and sea to snuff out any cross-border criminal activity that may occur.

Walker's comments on the Canadian border came in response to a question from NBC News' Chuck Todd, who asked Walker if the U.S. should consider building a wall along the northern border amid calls by some Republican presidential candidates to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico.

"Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire," Walker told Todd. "They have raised some very legitimate concerns, including some law enforcement folks that brought that up to me at one of our town hall meetings about a week and a half ago. So that's a legitimate issue for us to look at."

Walker's campaign spokesperson AshLee Strong has since said that Walker was not advocating that a wall be built but that he was responding to Todd's question in saying that he has heard concerns from other people about the security of the border.

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