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.
"It doesn't make sense that someone can't take their lunch across the border," complained Mark Seymour, president of trucking company Kriska Transportation of Prescott, Ont.
"It's not like packing a weapon. It's not contraband. It's food, and if it wasn't safe, they wouldn't be eating it."
In the past couple of weeks, Mr. Seymour said two of his drivers have been searched and fined $300 (U.S). They were also detained for hours.
One of the truckers, he said, was carrying a soy burger and a can of Campbell's Chunky soup in a lunch packed by his wife.
Hey, I've heard that Turrists have perfected the multipart Nukular Sandwich Bomb, which masquerades as an innocuous han sarnie or soyburger until mixed with the contents of a can innocently labelled Campbells...
There's a SSIF aspect to this that boggles the mind:
[talking head] estimated that all border delays are adding as much as $600-million (Canadian) a year to the cost of transborder shipping.
However, truck and car traffic has dropped substantially this year, mitigating the full impact of tighter security, because of the slowing U.S. economy, the higher value of the Canadian dollar and the perception that the border is more restrictive, according to Mr. Bradley.
In the first nine months of this year, 100,000 fewer trucks than last year crossed the border -- a drop of 1.3 per cent.
Many truckers, he lamented, are getting out of the business because they've decided making trips to the United States just "isn't worth the hassle."
Anecdotal evidence also suggests that Canadian exporters are increasingly shifting operations to the United States to avoid problems at the border.
and this they call NAFTA? so what's the real agenda here? any guesses?
1) to ensure business for the US fast food chain outlets and motels just over the border, by making sure truckers and motorists arrive hungry and exhausted
2) to force Canadian operations to shift onto US territory thus creating a market for the glut of sprawlified real estate and big box construction.
3) there isn't any agenda, it's just the characteristic metastasis of the Security State.
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