Eliminating the Canadian Wheat Board’s conflicting signals will increase the efficiencies of the grain handling system, said railroad and grain company officials at the Canada Grains Council’s annual meeting.
It’s not an outrageous claim, said the acting head of the University of Manitoba’s Transport Institute.
“Having the two systems together in a commercial way will be much better,” said Paul Earl in an interview.
“There’s no question about it.”
Jean Marc Ruest, a Richardson International vice-president and chair of the grains council, and Stephen Whitney, a Canadian Pacific Railway vice-president, said arranging transportation and handling of former board grains in the same manner as other crops will make the system work better.
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“As one system, I think that it will translate into one way of conducting the sales and logistics of that commodity,” said Ruest.
“We used to have, I would suggest, two pipelines operating through the same facilities, which created a number of inefficiencies. Now we have one pipeline that we can manage from start to finish that will increase efficiencies and I would say increase the size of the pipeline….
“We’ve actually created more space in the Canadian grain handling system.”
Earl said there were conflicts between the commercial system, which is used by non-board crops, as well as by other commodities running down the country’s two railway lines, and the command-and-control system employed by the wheat board.
A single set of elevators, rail lines and terminals was being given signals by two different marketing mechanisms and it led to frequent misallocations of rail cars and storage capacity, costing farmers money, he said.
