I'm with mahigan, too

It seems to be my day to be a dittohead. Mahigan tackles the story of the delay in allowing Canadian beef into the U.S. You can read the whole post but here's the money quote.

Someone needs to give Mr. Dithers a rectal craniotomy and acquaint him with that most foreign of concepts "leadership". Some Canadian producers are calling for a meeting withing the week with the federal government to discuss a large expansion in Canadian processing capacity - a discussion that should have been held a year and a half ago. We need to implement 100% testing of all cattle for BSE - another decision a year and a half overdue. We can then ban the import of US beef as not meeting our standards and move on to compete with Brazil and Australia for the Asian market where we are likely to be well received.

At the same time we need to be imposing tariffs against US commodities as already authorized by the WTO. We need to be aggressively pursuing WTO authorization to recover the $4 billion stolen from us in the softwood lumber dispute. We need to withdraw from any further talks on the NAFTA+ agreement which will only bring us more of the same and we need to be aggressively seeking a wide range of new trading partners. Get off your ass Mr. Dithers. It's time to start earning your paycheck.

We can sit on our hands and pretend that the spirit of "free trade" will be honored, or we can recognize that given the current state of the American economy, the protectionism we're seeing there will likely only increase while the American consumer's buying power will soon deteriorate. We badly need a Plan B.

Mahigan's right: we should have raised our testing standards to Japanese levels long ago so we could compete in that market instead of waiting for favorable rulings from NAFTA tribunals and the WTO that American lobbyists and legislators will only ignore.