Canadian National Railway is cutting back its container services in Saskatchewan at a time when more pulse crops are being shipped in the metal boxes.
The company is closing its container terminal in Regina because it wasn’t making money, said a CN spokesperson.
“We weren’t able to negotiate rate increases with the shipping container owners so at that point we decided to terminate the service,” said Jim Feeny.
The Regina facility was a satellite yard that fed the main container terminal in Saskatoon, which remains open for business. It handled only six percent of the railway’s container business in the province.
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Processors in and around Regina who still want to ship product by container on CN lines will have to work out an agreement between the ocean shipping companies that own the maritime containers and a local trucking company that can transport the units to Saskatoon.
Special crops industry reaction to the closure has been mixed.
“The closing of the container terminal in Regina is not good news for our members,” said Canadian Special Crops Association executive director Francois Catellier.
“Whenever you’re affecting that (container) supply, that’s obviously going to make it more challenging for our membership, especially the membership in that southern to central Saskatchewan region that was depending on those containers.”
According to a transportation study sponsored by the Saskatchewan Pulse Growers Association, 20 percent of the pulse crops exported out of the province moved by marine container in 1999. They are an increasingly popular way of moving human consumption pulse crops to ports in Vancouver and Montreal.
Monte Miller, chair of the Canadian Special Crops Association’s transportation committee, said higher container freight costs may force some shippers to shift back to boxcars.
“If you can’t get source-loaded stuff in Regina, people will either move it to Winnipeg or Saskatoon and try and get source loaded containers there – but you’re adding on an extra freight component.”
Not every special crops shipper is sad to see the demise of CN’s Regina container terminal. Steve Bodnoff, who owns a processing facility in the city, is indifferent.
“Their service in Regina has been next to nothing for us anyway. As far as I know they were always closed – they just made it official,” said the president of Agtech Processors Inc.
“I won’t even miss it, to be honest, because whenever we’ve attempted to do some business through CN none of the equipment was available.”
Bodnoff uses the Canadian Pacific Railway container terminal in Regina, which feeds the CPR’s main line that runs through the city. CPR also has a terminal in Saskatoon.
Francis Gaudet, who owns Belle Pulses Ltd. in St. Isidore-de Bellevue, Sask., thinks the steamship lines may move some of their maritime container business from CN to CPR as a result of the closure.
But Feeny said CN is taking steps to prevent that. The company has contacted several local trucking outfits who are interested in moving containers from Regina to Saskatoon and has passed those names on to the steamship lines that own the containers.
“We want to retain as much of that business as possible. We don’t want it eroding over to CP.”
