A senior Transport Canada official has rejected charges that the department deliberately undermined negotiations to transfer federal grain hopper cars to the Farmer Rail Car Coalition.
A number of FRCC officials say department bureaucrats never wanted the cars to be sold to the FRCC and acted accordingly in negotiations.
Helena Borges, director general of surface transportation policy for Transport Canada, said that’s not the case.
“As the key person who was negotiating the deal, I can tell you that Transport Canada was not being obstructionist,” she said.
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Borges said the department operated in good faith and worked closely with FRCC officials in an attempt to reach a deal.
“If they’re saying otherwise, I think that’s unfortunate because we were working very hard and so were they.”
However, FRCC director Rob Lobdell doesn’t buy it.
Lobdell, president of West Central Road and Rail, said the department is “notoriously railway friendly” and acted in an obstructionist manner after the former Liberal government announced in March 2005 it would sell the cars to the FRCC.
At that time, transport minister Jean Lapierre said he wanted a deal by the end of April, with the cars being transferred Aug. 1, 2005.
But negotiations dragged on through the summer and fall, resulting in only an agreementÐin-principle requiring further negotiations, which was announced shortly before the Liberal government was defeated.
Once the Conservatives took power, there were no further negotiations. On May 4, the government announced it would not sell the cars to the FRCC and instead would provide them to the railways at no cost.
“If a bureaucracy is reluctant to carry out a mandate, they can drag it out indefinitely, and in this case they dragged it out to the point where we find ourselves today,” Lobdell said.
He said the former Liberal government should have cracked the whip on Transport Canada last summer.
Borges said the department was only exercising due diligence in a complex negotiation involving a number of difficult financial, operational and administrative issues.
“Our obligation was to ensure that the interests of the industry, the interests of producers and the interests of taxpayers were all protected,” she said.
FRCC president Sinclair Harrison said the coalition faced an uphill battle throughout its 10 years of dealing with Transport Canada.
He recalled being told at his first meeting with a former deputy minister of transport a decade ago that there were two problems with the FRCC’s bid to buy the cars: farmers aren’t smart enough to run such a complex business and a hopper car is too complicated a piece of equipment for farmers to deal with.
“I think that feeling still runs through Transport Canada,” Harrison said.
