While cash-starved farmers look to Ottawa for immediate financial relief, suggestions on how to reduce costs in the long term will soon be in the government’s hands.
Willard Estey’s review of the grain handling and transportation system will be submitted to transport minister David Collenette before the end of December.
“I hope the farmers will take some comfort in what we’re able to churn out,” Estey said in an interview from his Toronto law office last week.
The retired Supreme Court justice said producers should be able to find in his report some ideas that would reduce the costs of handling and shipping grain and thereby improve their financial situation down the road.
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“I hope that’s so,” he said. “It has no other purpose.”
While the farm income crisis squeezing grain and hog producers is not specifically within the transportation review’s jurisdiction, Estey said it has loomed large in the background as the report is written.
“It certainly motivates your desire for finding solutions helpful to the farmer,” he said, adding that the bottom line for him has always been coming up with solutions to put more money in farmers’ hands. “That’s what it’s all about.”
He declined to discuss any of the issues that will be addressed in the report, which has been in the making for nearly a year and involved extensive consultations with farm and grain industry groups, provincial governments, railways and regulators.
Estey also met with hundreds of individual farmers at a series of town hall meetings across the Prairies and traveled to the United States to look at that country’s grain handling and transportation system.
The report is expected to make recommendations on nearly 20 issues, including freight rates, rail-line abandonment, elevator closures, competition between the railways, the role of the Canadian Wheat Board in transportation, the future of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the grain grading system and labor relations.
Estey said his year-long examination of the system drove home to him that prairie grain farmers are in a unique situation, in that they have no control over their major costs.
“The producer of the wealth pays 100 percent of the costs of producing that wealth,” he said. “I’ve never encountered anything like it.”
