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.

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