Commodity shippers disappointed with the federal government’s Fair Rail Freight Service Act that is moving quickly through the Senate en route to approval this month face a dilemma.
Should they insist the bill be improved and risk losing it altogether or accept it as it is as a flawed first step?
This week, shipper representatives are before the Senate transportation committee asking senators to do what the Conservative majority in the House of Commons refused to do — accept amendments that will better protect shipper rights against railway power.
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Yet if the committee accepted the amendments and sent the bill back to the Senate for debate and if the amendments were approved, it would mean Bill C-52 would have to go back to the House of Commons that already approved it without amendment.
The Commons, adjourning next week for the summer, could not get to the bill until autumn to reopen the debate.
In the meantime, the government is expected to prorogue Parliament this summer to start a new session in September. All legislation that has not been approved would die.
Industry witnesses argued it is a weak bill that needs strengthening and it must make it into law.
So should they press the Senate to accept amendments to strengthen shipper rights in hopes Parliament would deal with it in the autumn or take what they know they have?
Liberal senator Terry Mercer laid out the problem to Canadian Fertilizer Institute policy and government relations director Robert Godfrey yesterday.
“You say you want the bill passed and out of here before we rise for the summer, then you have given us mission impossible,” he said.
By the time the Senate approved amendments, the House of Commons will be “long gone. That means you get nothing,” said Mercer. “I just wanted to put forward a little reality check.”
When pressed, all the shipper representatives said they would prefer the weak bill they have to nothing and hope it can be improved when the Canadian Transportation Act is reviewed in 2015.
“I think we are afraid of losing it,” Grain Growers of Canada executive director Richard Phillips told senators as he agreed a weak bill is better than no bill.
“The point we want to leave with you by mentioning these amendments over and over again is that if we have to come back in three years and it did not work, we want you to remember that we were here and said we needed those amendments,” he said.
Mercer assured him that as a senator with a fixed term, he will be around for the 2015 review.
Keep the Senate committee informed of how the legislation is working, he advised Phillips.
“It would be helpful so that when you come back and say ‘I told you so,’ we will not be surprised.”
