District reflects on Sept. 11 anniversary

The scene of commercial airliners colliding into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and then into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., played to the disbelief of millions a year ago today.
On Sept. 11, four hijacked planes killed more than 3,000 people within mere minutes of each other—shattering a sense of security around the world.
One year later, district residents are still coping with what this act of terrorism means for them.
“I’ll never forget where I was when I found out,” Deborah Whetzel of Morson said Tuesday.
Whetzel had a massage appointment that morning, but when she arrived she found the therapist staring at the TV screen.
“I was there for an hour or two watching it with her. We were just so in shock. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing.
“It was indescribable. . . . My in-laws live two hours south of Washington, D.C. and I just wanted to call and talk to them,” she recalled.
A year later, Whetzel—who holds both Canadian and U.S. citizenship, is still determining how Sept. 11 affected her life.
“I think it really did change the way we see the world,” she admitted. “In a way, we recognize the brevity of life.”
Whetzel’s husband drives a truck and is often away from home for weeks at a time. She said now she takes a moment to really say good-bye before he leaves.
“You just don’t know, and it makes you realize that every moment should count with the people you love,” she stressed.
“People in this area are now aware of how vulnerable we are to terrorism,” Fort Frances Mayor Glenn Witherspoon said Monday. “Things will never be the same.”
To honour the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks, the town was to lower its flags to half-mast today. There also will be a moment of silence during the official sister city signing ceremony with International Falls here tomorrow afternoon at the Civic Centre.
The biggest change locally since last Sept. 11 certainly has been at the border.
“Sept. 11 has heightened our attention,” Greg Mercure, chief of operations for Canada Customs here, said Monday.
“We’re not doing anything new or different than prior to Sept. 11. It has caused us to re-focus our attention to do the same things and try to do them better,” he noted.
In the past year, the number of examinations at Canada Customs has increased 350 percent.
Additional seasonal staff was hired and communication with law enforcement agencies in both countries was improved. This co-operation was evident during the World Health Organization conference here back in May.
“We ran an eight-day operation with all the joint agencies to monitor the area from Rainy Lake to the Manitoba border,” Mercure said.
Local MP Robert Nault, also the minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, said yesterday that Sept. 11 had a profound effect on the federal government.
In the past year alone, Ottawa allocated $7 billion for security and anti-terrorism initiatives.
“The challenges that lie ahead for us are very much . . . assuring Canadians that we do have security policy plans in place to deal with the unfortunate possibility that there might be terrorist activities in our country,” Nault said.
“We have the largest borders in the world with the United States [and] it has its unique difficulties in manning and protecting its sovereignty,” he added.
Mercure agreed supervising remote border areas such as Rainy Lake and Rainy River was just one of the areas Customs officials were focusing on.
“There has been a recognition, I believe, that to a large degree we in Canada . . . have been spared. That it couldn’t happen here in Canada,” NDP leader and local MPP Howard Hampton said yesterday.
But Hampton did wonder if Canada lost part of its sovereignty in the past year.
“There’s pressure from the United States to fall in line with whatever they might be thinking at the moment,” he argued.
When four Canadian soldiers were killed and eight others injured after an American pilot dropped a 500-pound bomb on their night training exercise near Kandahar this past spring, many Canadians questioned our involvement in the war against terrorism.
“War never defeated terrorism,” Hampton declared. “The only way to defeat terrorism is by dealing with the underlining causes—poverty, inequality, a sense of injustice—that drive people to terrorist acts.”
Nault disagreed with Hampton, arguing we have not lost our independence in working with the U.S.
“Working together doesn’t mean you lose control, it just means that you share resources and you share information and be prepared to act jointly when there are threats,” he countered.