SASKATOON – A who’s who of the grain handling and transportation industry met behind closed doors last week to try to answer the question that’s uppermost on everyone’s mind.
What do we do now?
The industry has been turned on its head by the news that the Crow Benefit rail subsidy is on its way out and a deregulated transportation system is on its way in.
In the days since the Feb. 27 announcement, the people who grow, buy, sell and ship grain for a living have been trying to figure out just what the changes will mean for them and how their businesses will be different after Aug. 1.
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In a downtown Saskatoon hotel last week, 85 representatives from farm groups, grain handlers, railways, terminal operators, truckers, labor unions and governments, got together to hash over some of the issues they’ll have to deal with.
They managed to boil it down to eight priority areas, including things like the future of the branch line and elevator network, rail car allocation, labor-management relations, competitiveness, and how to spend a $300 million transition fund promised by Ottawa.
Different opinions
Not surprisingly, there was no real agreement on what should happen in all those areas.
“There are still enough divergent views at a conference like that that you don’t come out with an action plan that everyone will buy into,” said participant Don Kelsey of the National Farmers Union.
The invitation-only meeting, which didn’t include the media, was sponsored by the Western Transportation Advisory Council (Westac).
Council president David Gardiner said in an interview there was no attempt to come to a consensus.
“We’re not making a public statement and saying this should be done or that should be done,” he said. “There’s nothing earth-shattering coming out of it. It was just a matter of trying to see how they can co-operate in the new environment.”
Most of those interviewed during breaks in the meeting said it was useful to have all the different interests sitting down together in one room to share information and hear other points of view.
Promise not kept
However Ron Glein, a farmer from Chaplin, Sask., and member of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities’ transportation committee, said the meeting didn’t live up to its early promise.
“The first two days, everybody talked very openly about being willing to change,” he said. “But when we got down to the final day, everybody kind of pulled in their horns and went back to their old positions.”
That kind of approach could prove disastrous, he said, warning that if everybody doesn’t set aside their own agendas and work together to reduce costs and increase efficiencies, the whole Canadian system will be jeopardized.
Farmers will look for the cheapest way to get their grain to market, whether it’s trucking to the West Coast or the south of the border. Canadian grain handlers and railways will lose business and once the new patterns are established they could become permanent.
