The feature, the first in a series of articles discussing the border and musings in both Canada and the U.S. about eliminating or at very least streamlining the frontier, focused on the community's most famous international quirk, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House. It would have been a good question to pose to some of those Stanstead-ites. Heinrich supposes that if the border here were dismantled, no one would likely care. But he didn't ask anyone here in town. So here's one opinion.
People tend to define themselves by their boundaries.
You would think that this would be apparent to someone from a paper editorially opposed to forced municipal mergers in Montreal. Even the Haskell is defined by the border. It would still be a beautiful building without the border but without that line running down the middle, it would be just a beautiful building. As we've seen with the nonsense on the roof of the library this week, the rules that divide our two nations can clash to generate ridiculous bureaucratic farce. But that's the price of living in such close proximity with your neighbors.