Our tour stops today included Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the US Embassy to Canada, and a tour of the Canadian Parliament all in Canada's national capital of Ottawa. We spent about 6 total hours driving between our morning ride to Ottawa, Ontario from Montreal, Quebec and our evening trip from Ottawa, Ontario to Belleville, Ontario. We were all happy and relieved to be in an English speaking province! The long drives gave me plenty of time to take a nap, catch up on emails, and chat with new friends about agriculture and what we saw today.
Some take always :
- Canada and America, more specifically Illinois, are huge agriculture trade partners, trading things like corn and soybeans as well as processed foods and baked goods totaling $3.1 billion in trade.
- Canada is the #1 producer of canola which was created in Canada and literally means Canada Oil Seed.
- The US exports more agriculture products to Canada than it does the Japan, China, and the United Kingdom combined.
- The NAFTA trade agreement is very important to Canadian Agriculture and their consumers
- NAFTA is a bit one sided currently benefiting Canadian agriculture more than American agriculture and needs to be renegotiated
Did I mention that it rained? It has rained every damn day of our trip! Just for a little while and then it's usually beautiful for the rest of the day. Most of the time I have been able to grab my rain coat and stay dry but not today! We were traveling light because of the high security in the embassy and at parliament so I left basically everything on the bus. While standing in line at parliament, it began to rain. We had no where to go to escape it so there we all were in our wet polos and wet khakis with wet hair and running mascara. Let me tell you, everybody was a trooper. Just one more great memory made on this super fun trip and we did eventually dried off... just had a bit flatter hair and half the makeup.
At dinner I tried a local (brewed in the same county) hard apple cider. It was awesome.
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