Leadership Quote by Dan Miller

Dan Miller borrows Robert Frost the way politicians borrow flags: not to parse the poem, but to recruit its cultural authority. “Good fences make good neighbors” is already a meme in North American civic life, shorthand for common-sense boundaries. Miller flips it into a dare. By invoking Frost, he signals he knows the old, comfortable logic of separation; by rejecting it, he pitches a newer border story where cooperation outperforms barricades.

The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “I’d like to think” softens what is, underneath, a clear policy posture: cross-border partnership between Alaska and British Columbia. He’s not denying the existence of a border so much as demoting it from a moral necessity to a bureaucratic detail. “Pretty darned” is folksy on purpose, a vernacular wink that frames international relations as neighborliness, not geopolitics. That tone matters in the North, where communities, trade routes, and ecosystems ignore neat lines on a map.

The subtext is pragmatic: resource development, transportation corridors, tourism, fisheries, energy, emergency response. When a politician talks about “without fences,” he’s also talking about frictions - paperwork, tariffs, jurisdictional turf wars, and the reflexive politics of sovereignty. Miller’s argument is that the Alaska-BC relationship can be a counterexample to the era’s border anxiety: proof that shared interests and shared terrain can produce security through interdependence, not suspicion.

It’s a regional pitch with a national echo: if the world insists on fences, at least the neighbors can stop acting like strangers.