REGINA – Efforts of the Farmer Rail Car Coalition to purchase the federal government’s 13,000 hopper cars have been boosted by a grant from the Saskatchewan government.
Highways and transportation minister Andy Renaud said last week the government has committed $250,000 to help the coalition prepare its business plan for submission to Ottawa.
Renaud said it is a conditional grant which must be repaid if the coalition is successful in its bid. The money is coming out of the province’s highways budget for what he deemed “an important cause.”
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He referred to a study earlier this year which suggested savings of $3.5 billion over 20 years if farmers own the cars. “That money would stay in farmers’ pockets and be spent here.”
Renaud said Bill C-14 gives more power to the railways in a deregulated system, “a system that the producers of Western Canada are forced to use.”
Ownership brings power
Farmers won’t have a say unless they also have ownership, he said.
“The coalition has had some success already, in that they have achieved full membership status on the Car Allocation Policy Group.”
Sinclair Harrison, coalition chair, said the grant is good news but he doesn’t know if the coalition has enough money for its business plan. He said the group based its cost on what airports paid for their business plans when they were privatizing.
“It was running anywhere from $800,000 to $1 million,” he said. “Certainly we don’t have those kinds of resources. We feel that perhaps we have close to enough money but we don’t have the request for proposal yet either. It was supposed to come in June. We’re at the end of September, so if it drags on much longer we’re going to have to re-evaluate our finances.”
Western Economic Diversification has also given the coalition more than $250,000, Harrison said.
