Policy Brief (June 2011) by Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, Jean Monet Chair in European Border and Region Policy and Director of EU Centre of Excellence, University of Victoria.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama met on Friday February 4, 2011, to launch what the media have called the Washington Declaration : two new initiatives broadly understood as a ‘’new perimeter strategy’’. This brief presents evidence that these two initiatives, and in particular the one on border security, are part of a North American form of integration deemed to be policy parallelism in an area where Canada and the U.S already share a long history.