Not pleased with US busing arrangement

Letter to the Editor,
Re: All passengers must board bus in USA if bound for Canada

If anyone read this heading they would assume that the article would be about USA citizens who were traveling to Canada, but this is not anywhere near that, this story is much more ludicrous than that!
Canadian Citizens, children, who wish to travel to another school in Canada on a field trip must travel past their own schools to a foreign country, get on a bus, then return to their own country and past their school once again.
This is all in the name of the lowest bidder on a busing contract?
So our school board is teaching new economics to our kids, rule number one, the lowest price wins no matter what the final cost. And then to have the audacity to offer the second place Canadian company a chance at being a fill-in for them.
That’s right kids, your job is not important, only money. If the board can save a few dollars by making your parents spend a few extra and at the same time putting them out of a job, then they have done their teaching job in full.
Some of the students have a parent who is a bus driver, do they understand that now there is not enough in the cupboards because a company from another country, which their parents could never be employed with, now has Mom’s or Dad’s job?
Part of a school curriculum should be teaching children the benefits of keeping the local economy operating by shopping at local stores and services. Not the opposite.
Let’s keep this straight, the reason that this company is making 100% of the kids board in the USA is because if they didn’t have them all board there, they would have to hire a Canadian driver. Imagine that, a Canadian with a Canadian job, working in Canada. It has nothing to do with insurance, or anything else.
This could have been easily avoided by putting in the contract that the students had to be picked up at their school. Maybe we should contract out teaching jobs too? Might be cheaper to have USA teachers teaching our children in US schools, rather than having to hire all those Canadian people to teach, maintain and run our own schools?
The final cost to our community is the loss of business which is what creates employment. Here it is plain and simple for the board - No local business, no local employment, no local people...
I wonder how long it will be before our school board begins making the students from Atikokan and Nestor Falls travel to the border to board a bus? Or maybe it will become cheaper to have all of the children from the country board yellow a bus in the USA? Citizens from USA would never stand for such asinine behavior and nor should we.
How could the board even have considered giving this contract to a company which is directly taking jobs from our community, not putting anything back into our community, or even our country and forcing parents and children to commute to another country, some who may not even be able to, when many could walk to their local school and back.
Had the contract stated that all students were required to be picked up and dropped off at their own school this would never have happened.
Who in outer space could have made this decision?

–Richard Trenchard,
Rainy River, Ont.