Connection below to a Globe and Mail article on border patrols and the truckers' evil lunches.
There's a money grab behind it all, of course, revealed in the article, yet within it we see what idiocy the US feds like to bring to the public's awareness, whereas the most serious threats of border crossing wannabe terrorists will be situated at and along commercial rail and shipping routes, particularly at the Mexican border and any given American port. Commodities are barely checked, but dare to try and make good time by bringing a lunch on a long journey as a trucker, let alone try to avoid fast-food god awful fare, and it can be enough to make you give up the much fought for truckers' FAST card for border crossings. Natalia |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| WAR DEPARTMENT |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| CARRY A BOLOGNA SANDWICH IN YOUR TRUCK AND THE TERRORISTS WIN BARRIE MCKENNA - 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 travelers about a border that has become thick with intense screening, hefty fees, body searches, long waits and unexpected hassles. . . "We're now into check everything, everyone, all the time," said David Bradley, chief executive officer of the Canadian Trucking Alliance, which represents 4,500 trucking companies. . . But treating truckers, who already go through extensive background checks to get their border-crossing U.S. FAST cards, as potential terrorists is "like taking a cannon to a fruit fly," said Mr. Bradley, who was in Washington yesterday for meetings with U.S. customs officials and staff at the Canadian embassy. . . 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. http://tinyurl.com/wfof2 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
