Wednesday night's Republican debate focused on foreign policy—and one policy proposed by Vivek Ramaswamy has raised some eyebrows on the other side of the world's longest border. The candidate pledged to build a wall along the 5,524-mile border with Canada, an idea former Alberta premier Jason Kenney dismisses as "completely nuts." "Building such a wall is completely, obviously unfeasible," he tells the BBC. "Doing so would likely take decades and cost at least hundreds of billions of dollars."
Kenney says he's never heard American national security officials propose a border wall because "they all know that it would be a catastrophic waste of resources without a significant improvement in border security." During the debate, Ramaswamy said he was the only candidate to have visited the northern border, the CBC reports. "There was enough fentanyl that was captured just on the northern border last year to kill three million Americans," he said. "Don't just build the wall—build both walls." According to US Customs and Border Protection, two pounds of fentanyl have been seized at the northern border this year, a tiny fraction of the 27,000 pounds seized at other locations.
Ramaswamy's proposal "appears to be a targeted play for votes in New Hampshire," where Gov. Chris Sununu has expressed concern about unauthorized border crossings, and an effort by the longshot candidate to appear tougher on border security than his rivals, the Globe and Mail reports. "I suspect Mr. Ramaswamy knows perfectly well that his proposal is a complete non-starter," Kenney says. "But it is part of his effort to be as ridiculously provocative as possible." But the pledge could win Ramaswamy some votes: After Scott Walker made a similar suggestion in 2015, 41% of people in a Bloomberg poll said they wanted a wall along the border with Canada as well as the border with Mexico. (More Vivek Ramaswamy 2024 stories.)
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