Money is about to pour into Winnipeg’s inland port scheme, turning a long-envisioned idea into reality.
Eastern prairie farmers are hoping it means new ways to get farm commodities from the centre of the continent and into buyers’ hands.
“It’s exciting and it’s great that some actual dollars are going into it,” Manitoba Pulse Growers executive director Chris Sumner said about the Centre-Port proposal, to which prime minister Stephen Harper and Manitoba premier Gary Doer committed $212.5 million April 14.
“Any province that has a facility like that could gain an advantage.”
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The CentrePort plan is to build a road, rail and air freight hub around the Winnipeg airport.
Manitoba has long extolled its virtues as a current and potential transportation hub, lying at the geographic centre of Canada and at the northern terminus of a north-south transportation route that leads through the central United States to Mexico.
However, it has failed to develop its anticipated potential.
The federal and provincial money takes the idea from a plan on paper, similar to proposals in Regina and Edmonton, to one that is set to begin construction in early 2010.
Keystone Agricultural Producers vice-president Robert McLean said the financial commitment means something is guaranteed to happen.
Ensuring that it increases farm product exports is essential, he added.
“We all want more value-added to happen in the province because we need to add value to the commodities we produce,” McLean said.
“Having this facility right here in Winnipeg will help connect us to our customers.”
Sumner said pulse producers could be big winners when the inland port is built, but they will need rail containers and stuffing and processing plants to make their crops more attractive as exports.
“We need the cans,” Sumner said about the difficulty in getting containers to the Prairies.
“If the shippers won’t let them come this far inland, we can’t pack them and send them out with our products.”
Manitoba has a bustling manufacturing sector that is keen to expand the province’s exporting capabilities, so the key for farmers is to make sure agriculture is included in the CentrePort plans and not left as an afterthought, Sumner said.
Meat exports could also take advantage of expanded air freight facilities.
In the 1990s, Manitoba planned to boost international air freight with a major development, but the Winnport concept never got far.
The government money is dedicated to developing traffic interchanges that will connect the 20,000 acre site to the city’s perimeter highway and the Trans-Canada Highway as well as providing rail access to the area.
Winnipeg is a major trucking and rail transport centre. Major rail yards run near the centre of the city and in various other locations, while the trucking industry dominates the city’s northwest corner.
At one time the city played a far bigger role, handling huge volumes of trade that flowed from the east coast of North America and sometimes from Europe to the Pacific coast, where it could be transferred to ships heading to Asia.
When the Panama Canal was opened, much of that transport disappeared and Winnipeg’s role became less important.
