Homerland Security & Canada U.S. Relations
Charles-
Let me apologize to your Canadian readers for my country's attack upon yours at the border.
TRANSPORTATION
Brown-bag crackdown: Protecting the U.S. from lunch meat, soup
BARRIE MCKENNA
WASHINGTON -- It's the kind of hearty fare you might find in any bag lunch: a bologna sandwich, maybe a burger, a can of soup and a piece of fruit.
But for a growing number of the truckers who are plying routes across the Canada-U.S. border, packing a lunch has become risky business.
Drivers say they've been fined, detained for hours and threatened with confiscation of their U.S.-issued identity cards for trying to enter the United States with seemingly innocuous, but undeclared food items.
The brown-bag crackdown is the latest in a growing list of complaints from truckers and travellers about a border that has become thick with intense screening, hefty fees, body searches, long waits and unexpected hassles.
Full story:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20061207.RTRUCKERS07/TPStory/Business
I do not support this harrassment, and I am embarrassed that this sort of thing is allowed to occur.
The last time I crossed the border into Canada this fall, I was chatting with a Canadian Border Patrol agent and I asked him, "Did you get your guns yet?"
He replied, "No. Why? Did you want to shoot it, if I had?" And I replied, "Yes. Yes, I do want to shoot it." He said, "Oh, they're going to be nothing special, just some old RCMP retired 32 Specials they have had in storage for years."
There are fully-automatic M16s, grenade launchers and cruise missiles on our side of the border, I'm sure. Homerland Security wouldn't go to war without them.
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
Limestone, Maine
An Illustrated Philosophy Primer for Young Readers
http://www.geocities.com/donaldwrobertson/index.html
1 comment:
This is how the US handles trade policies now that they are the sole superpower:
1. Softwood lumber: impose illegal duties, ignore all the free trade tribunals for years. Get a 'friendly' PM elected and return some of the money you stole. Tell the PM you have a 'take it or leave it' deal that protects your own industries and tailors another country's to your own.
2. Meat Processing: Buy up all the processing plants in Canada, have them function the same as yours do, with virtually no regulations, then when one 'mad cow' is discovered, shut down the border. Make sure the press doesn't cover the fact that you've discovered mad cow in your own herd. Then get the PM to throw a billion dollar subsidy at your american owned processors, leaving ranchers out of it. Make sure you have a drunken Premier to act indignant whenever anybody dares mention and investigation of where all the subsidy money goes.
Just to boot, now that you own almost all processors and the meat has to all be sold in Canada and there is an oversupply-start up a massive 'buy canadian beef' marketing campaign so canadians don't notice that although there is an oversupply of beef, the prices never go down. To the few reporters that follow up explain that because you process ALL meat, you can't drop prices because then nobody would buy your chicken and pork.
3. When there is report on a potato blight, close the border to PEI potatoes before any investigation is done and its discovered that there is nothing there. Since its only PEI nobody will notice anyway.
4. Pay off a Market Studies Organization to push for MORE harmonization called "Atlantica" in energy policies to make sure Canadians don't ever try to retaliate in the only product canada has that americans need-energy.
The weird thing is that so called intelligent people actually push for MORE business dealings with the US to solve economic problems!
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