Ottawa pours more money into pine beetle fight

The federal government has added another $2-million to a program to control the spread of the forest-eating mountain pine beetle.

The tiny black bug has already destroyed millions of trees in Alberta and British Columbia, and there are now fears it could spread all the way to the East Coast if control programs fail.

Tory MP Rob Merrifield says extremely cold weather over the winter destroyed large numbers of pine beetles in Northern and Southern Alberta, but some of them survived.