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Letter: A country called Canada

Published 3 April 2004

From Peter Fournier

We Canadians are quite used to Americans believing that the world begins and ends at their border, but we expect better from our British relations. Your news item about bison having nowhere to roam in North America states: “Virtually every large migrating North American animal outside Alaska lives in the Yellowstone Park ecosystem” (13 March, p 4).

This is incorrect. Canada is part of North America, and is home to huge herds of very healthy and very contented caribou, musk oxen, bison, elk, deer, moose, polar bear and a host of other large migrating animals free to roam over vast areas of the Canadian Shield (particularly northern Quebec and Ontario), the northern prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, most of the mountainous regions of British Columbia, and all of the northern provinces of Yukon, Nunavut and the rest of the former Northwest Territories. Anyone of those areas could absorb the Yellowstone ecosystem many times over.

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Issue no. 2441 published 3 April 2004

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