> Canada should not trust its biosecurity to US, New Zealand,
> Austrailian, or any other county's producers. (etc.)
Canada should not consider trade across the US border to be a biosecurity
matter any more than interstate trade in the US or interprovincial trade in
Canada should be a biosecurity matter.
As for bees, honey bees are not native to Canada and are only maintained
here by man, with considerable effort, and beside, most of the stock here
came from US sources. There are few natural barriers at the Canada/US
border, and, if there are separate regions that should be kept separate, it
is Eastern and Western Canada, not Canada and the USA.
The current canadian border closure to US mainland stock was (supposed to
be) simply a temporary quarantine to slow the spread of a new and poorly
understood pest. The ban was similar to those imposed early on by some US
states for a short while. Those local bans, in the US, lasted only until it
was seen that the direct and indirect costs of the quarantine were more
disruptive and costly than the pests being controlled. Unfortunately,
national politics being what they are in Canada, undoing our border closure
was not as simple as imposing it, and reason has had very little part in the
discusion until lately.
At supper tonight I sat with two Europeans and they talked of how a Dutchman
took his hives to Spain with him and back when he went for holidays, and how
the Western Europeans routinely went to Turkey, Egypt and other countries to
get bees. They seem to have thought continentally long before the current
union.
> The rules concerning "Africanized Bees" (AHB) are transparent
> political posturing, and therefore silly.
So was much of the rest of it, if mean spiritedness, self-dealing, and
protectionism can be called "silly".
allen
http://www.honeybeeworld.com
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