Nothing makes a farmer snarl more than a port strike or lockout that stops prairie grain flowing out to the world’s markets.
In a few days, farmers might have something fresh to snarl about if B.C. truckers and dock workers decide to strike. Right now it looks like the dockworkers situation might not go ballistic, but the situation with the truckers is still tense. Tensions have been high between price-cutting trucking companies and trucker representatives who are trying to enforce minimum pay rates. The truckers are considering holding a strike vote within days, and that could lead to a quick blockage.
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This affects prairie farmers because a good share of pulse exports are shipped by container. If there are no truckers working in Vancouver to truck the containers around, exports clog up and the whole system becomes snarled. By the end of the week there should be a better sense about whether or not a strike will erupt, but for now we’ll have to wait in limbo to find out.
No one wants to see exports get disrupted in the crucial winter shipping season, but the situation this year is especially tense, a source told me today, because pulse shipments were slowed during the autumn months by the financial crisis. Now that the credit crunch is uncrunching, exporters need to work hard and fast to make up for the lost time in October and November, when nothing was moving.
