Fast-paced political thrillers such as White Pine Pictures’ hit show The Border rarely have sentimental roots. But the origins of the series, now in production on its second season for CBC, can be found in the last line in the credits of the opening episode: ‘Dedicated to the memory of Lindalee Tracey.’ Despite the fact that she passed away a year and a half ago, Tracey is still listed as producer on the show that is her final creative legacy.

Like many an overnight success, The Border went through a long and complicated birthing process. In 1991, Tracey wrote The Uncounted Canadians, a lively and compassionate piece about illegal immigrants living in Canada. The Toronto Life article, which won several journalism awards, drew acclaim for its dramatic approach and vivid portraits of people living in near-poverty under the radar of authorities ready to arrest and deport them.

As her career progressed from mostly print and radio journalist to full-scale documentary filmmaker, Tracey decided to tackle the subject again. In 1997, she and husband and business partner Peter Raymont directed and produced Invisible Nation for their company White Pine and TVO.

Tracey was nominated for a Gemini Award as the director of this hard-hitting doc, which followed the lives of several people captured by police and immigration officers. Though it attempts to be even-handed in its approach, Tracey’s humanism and interest in lost causes is clear to viewers, and the doc is ultimately more about the immigrants than their captors.

After 9/11, of course, everything changed. Already in the process of creating a new documentary that would foreground immigration officers and the RCMP in their fight against illegals, Tracey’s and Raymont’s The Undefended Border became the first major TV series to be shot in the trenches of the new undeclared war on terrorism.

With gripping footage from Fort Erie as well as Ottawa and Toronto, this three-hour miniseries concentrates on such newly created agencies as the Immigration Task Force and the War Crimes Unit, as well as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the RCMP and the Immigration Department.

Responding to the new political situation and their shared sense that authorities should be treated with more empathy than before 9/11, Tracey and Raymont created a fast-paced doc that played with imagery from surveillance cameras and computers in new and exciting ways. Always fascinated by politics, the duo conveys with intensity the pressures that were suddenly placed on authorities as Canada came under criticism from the U.S. for purportedly lax enforcement of immigration laws.

The Undefended Border proved a success, garnering two Gemini nominations and strong ratings for TVO, Access Alberta, Knowledge Network and SCN.

Even before the documentary series was made, Raymont recalls that Tracey told him, ‘We should get a drama off the ground. And if there’s one issue that we really know it’s immigration enforcement.’

So the duo approached Slawko Klymkiw, then executive director of network programming at CBC, and he, in turn, brought on board Susan Morgan, then the network’s creative head of drama, and who now works for White Pine. After 9/11, the project slowly moved forward, assembling a writing and producing team including David Barlow, Brian Dennis, Janet McLean and Jeremy Hole. Finally, the CBC’s current regime, headed by Fred Fuchs and Kirstine Layfield, greenlit a pilot.

By then, four years had passed. The incandescent Tracey, who had blazed a path through Montreal’s and Toronto’s media communities, first as the feisty former stripper questioning pornography in the controversial National Film Board doc Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography, then as an investigative radio journalist on CBC’s As It Happens, and finally as producer/director of the pro-immigration series A Scattering of Seeds, had become gravely ill with cancer. Her final creative decision, according to Raymont, was to insist that the Immigration and Customs Security head office in The Border be ‘right on the lake, where you can get a sense of Toronto.’

The drama, budgeted at more than $1.5 million per episode, stars James McGowan and Sofia Milos in a dramatization of elite immigration and customs officers. It premiered in January to more than 700,000 viewers, and held on to them throughout its first season. CBC recently announced a pickup of season two, and it has sold to most European markets.

Tracey died while the first episode of The Border was being shot. Appropriately, the series has become the success she hoped for. Raymont is quietly confident that his charismatic and charming partner would be pleased.

www.cbc.ca/theborder