Jump to content

Talk:Canada–United States border

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Masterhatch (talk | contribs) at 08:51, 5 April 2022 (Undid revision 1081092117 by 103.75.21.251 (talk)). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 18 August 2021 and 18 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Greece12.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 16:37, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Notable Crossings

I noticed that the list of "Notable Crossings" was seemingly a list of crossings in Ontario. I did add the Peace Arch, which as the biggest crossing by traffic west of Ambassedor Bridge, is probably more notable, then the crossing in Sault Ste. Marie. I think that this list should probably be gutted maybe to two the five or six biggest ones. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.189.210.213 (talk) 21:35, 23 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The list should include crossings that have their own articles -- primarily bridges. That's how we define "notable". Powers T 15:24, 27 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
At some point this section became retitled "Notable bridge/tunnel crossings", so I removed Peace Arch and Blackpool.Wbaron (talk) 02:04, 8 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The TEXT of this article does not even mention the Rainy River (Minnesota–Ontario) between Ontario and Minnesota. Nor does it mention the Detroit River, the St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, the Niagara River, nor the Strait of Juan de Fuca. 47.215.180.7 (talk) 04:41, 6 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This could not have been before the boundary was delineated

This article currently says this:

The border [ . . . ] even divides some buildings found in communities in Vermont and Quebec whose construction pre-dated the border's delineation.

That part of the southern boundary of Quebec was "delineated" – marked by survey monuments – in 1771–3 by Collins and Valentine, but the buildings through which the border passes are plainly a lot newer than that, as may be seen via Google maps in Stanstead, Quebec and Derby Line Vermont, at the site of the Haskell Free Library and the house east of it through which the border passes, and some other buildings about two miles west of there. In particular, the Haskell Free Library was deliberately located so that the boundary passes through the building – hardly something that could have been done before the boundary was "delineated". Might it not better say that it was before authorities became fastidious about preventing construction in such locations? Michael Hardy (talk) 03:33, 8 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

A border can be officially surveyed, and yet not actually confirmed for exactly where it's located. Just within the past five years, for example, the border between North Carolina and South Carolina was shifted about 150 feet southward at Lake Wylie by efforts to clarify the precise location of the border with modern GPS technology — and the effects included at least one property that got split by the new state line, so that the guy's house is in one state and his back deck is in the other. And that's a border that had survey markers on it too — but some of the markers turned out to have been off.
We could potentially stand to be more precise about how the buildings in Vermont/Quebec came to be divided by the border, if we can find proper sourcing to clarify it better, but we can't just presume that the logical explanation is that the authorities just weren't "fastidious" enough to prevent construction of a building that was already known to be divided by the border. 18th-century survey markers, for example, are known in a lot of locations to veer off from the proper straight line that officially demarcates the border — even in the west where the Canada-US border is officially the 49th parallel of latitude, the actual border is not a perfectly straight line that exactly matches the precise GPS location of the 49th parallel, but a spaghetti-like line that wobbles up and down across the 49th parallel. It looks like a perfectly straight line on a map, because the map scale is too small to actually catch the wobbles, but on the ground it is not a perfectly straight line — and guess what the reason is: surveyor error.
So in reality, it's far more likely that the border was roughly surveyed but not carefully or precisely verified until after many of the divided buildings were already on top of it, rather than everybody knowing exactly what the builders were doing and the government just being too lazy to stop them. It's entirely possible for Haskell to have been intentional without meaning that all divided buildings were equally intended to be located smack on the borderline. Bearcat (talk) 21:31, 11 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
You are mistaken about this particular border. The Collins–Valentine line surveyed in the early 1770s was indeed "rough" in that they intended it to be the 45th parallel and it is in some places well over a thousand feet north of there, _but_ in 1842 the Webster–Ashburton Treaty said the border is to be where Collins and Valentine put the markers and _not_ at the actual 45th parallel. The Haskell Free Library and Opera House was deliberately located so that the border passes through the building, as required by Haskell's last will and testament, and the other buildings were very obviously built long after the treaty of 1842, as you will see from Google Maps.
I have sent an email to the two International Boundary Commissioners, in Ottawa and Washington, asking if they can clarify all of this and directing their attention to this present Wikipedia discussion page. I await their response.
And I wasn't alleging laziness; rather I was suggesting that standards of behavior were different during an earlier time, and it was not considered necessary to forbid putting buildings on the boundary. Michael Hardy (talk) 03:49, 12 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
People putting houses up
On the border louses up
Our ability to boss
Everyone who tries to cross.
    — John Joseph Enright
Michael Hardy (talk) 03:57, 12 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

This edit and some other recent edits seem to be based on deductions from ASSUMPTIONS that appear reasonable only until one knows certain facts. The lack of accuracy of the Collins and Valentine survey of the 1770s cannot explain the location of houses through which the boundary passes because when the inaccuracy was discovered it was decided NOT to correct it but to leave the border at the position where Collins and Valentine marked it with survey monuments. The border that passes through the buildings on the boundary between Vermont and Quebec is NOT a more accurately marked border established later; it is the inaccurately marked border establish by the survey of the 1770s, and it's officially still the border. Michael Hardy (talk) 21:39, 22 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Well, then find a proper source for what did happen. Because trust me, "everybody knew the houses were right smack on the border but nobody cared enough to do anything about it" is most certainly absolutely ten thousand per cent guaranteed not what happened either. Bearcat (talk) 21:51, 22 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
They certainly cared in the case of the Haskell Library, where the building was deliberatly built on the border. That may have been the case with others too. Probably there was a time in the past when putting buildings astride the border was not illegal and not frowned on. Michael Hardy (talk) 02:02, 23 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I received a reply from the International Boundary Commission, and it consisted of saying I might find the information here. To be continued . . . Michael Hardy (talk) 02:05, 23 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Border exclaves

Just a reminder, once again, that the "exclave" list in this article is only for listing places that have already been identified as exclaves in reliable sources. It's not an invitation to go scanning Google Maps or Wikimapia yourself to look for unnamed or unpopulated peninsulas that happen to be hanging off the wrong side of a riverbank, but have never been written about or identified as exclaves by external sources before — that is original research, which is prohibited by Wikipedia policy. Your source for adding an entry to the list must be a reliable media source which explicitly identifies the location, either verbally or in writing, as an exclave; it cannot simply be an online map of the location, because online maps can be wrong. (Trust me, I once had to submit a correction to Google Maps because the house my grandmother lived in when I was a kid was not and still isn't a WalMart.) Bearcat (talk) 22:09, 11 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Schornack?

The material about the dispute involving Dennis Schornack is entertaining, but seems tangential to the topic of this article. I may create a separate article titled International Boundary Commission and if it gets long enough, include that material there. Michael Hardy (talk) 17:12, 9 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

. . . . . and now I've created the new article. Michael Hardy (talk) 19:14, 9 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Canada–United States border. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

  • If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
  • If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 00:55, 30 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on Canada–United States border. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

  • If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
  • If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 08:07, 14 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Canada–United States border. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

  • If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
  • If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 18:34, 11 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Kilometres, yet mi?

Why is kilometres spelled fully, whereas miles isn't? Also, what's about other places that put the length at 5,527 mi?--Adûnâi (talk) 11:41, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What other places? Alaney2k (talk) 14:35, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
As for spelling, take a look at :Template:convert. Alaney2k (talk) 14:37, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

UPDATE, land crossings to close March 20, 2020

Canada-U.S. border closure amid coronavirus likely to start Friday night https://globalnews.ca/news/6701112/coronavirus-canada-us-canada-border/?fbclid=IwAR1BsZHfilI3Ab3EZoAIK0NC0QAUJCt2kHSyc4lp_V4PBe2qi2LGi2xbfXY

Freight will continue to cross; essential travel will still be allowed, e.g. Canadians going home. Peter K Burian (talk) 16:23, 19 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Canada–United_States_border&oldid=1081097102"