The new reality: Sept. 11 attack will have long lasting impact on business lives.

• Author: Atkins, Michael
• Position: Brief Article

Like most of you, as I emerge from the shock of Sept. 11, I am beginning to sober up and wonder where we are living now.

Because I commute between Northern Ontario and Toronto regularly by plane it is hard to forget yesterday's innocence.

Today I was stopped by airport security for carrying toenail clippers. I did not even know I had a pair of nail clippers in my travel bag.

Last week I arrived at my Toronto office with three police cars in the parking lot, dusting a brief case for fingerprints.

Life has changed. Newspapers cannot seem to think of anything else. We are living a movie.

Our tormentors are brilliant. They turned airplanes into bombs and have now turned the American postal service into butlers for poison. Most importantly they have by skill, or unintended consequence, captured our media. All they have to do is keep providing murderous incidents and we will keep watching. They are hard-wired into our collective psyche.

If the objective is to destabilize a market economy these people are doing a good job. They have, in the first round, no doubt exceeded objectives beyond their wildest dream. We have, of course, built a global trading system ripe for the task.

Just-in-time car makers struggle with border patrols moving at 30 per cent of yesterday's traffic. Most of us are entirely dependent on networked computing facilities open to disruption, and that is before we need talk about trains, planes, buses, bridges and food stores dependent on moving grapes from California to Timmins.

Although Northern Ontario gets to escape some of the edginess of major metropolitan cities, it will not avoid the fallout.

Metal markets are down, cross-border trade is more difficult and the first-impact has hit our outfitters in the hunting season which is a huge moneymaker for the North. In some markets Americans represent 90 per cent of the tourist trade.

There is no point candy-coating this assault. It is serious; it will be long lasting. It will impact our business lives for the fore-seeable future. It will increase the public debt, impact our consumer habits and no doubt reduced personal freedoms.

When you get to the bottom of it, North America is vulnerable not only because it is an open society, but because it is addicted to speed and other...