English Bay is beginning to resemble a parking lot for grain ships.
As of Feb. 5, six vessels sat at anchor in the waters off Vancouver, six were loading and 11 slated to arrive this week for at total of 23.
Another eight at Prince Rupert, B.C., brought the total to 31.
One ship had been waiting 22 days to pick up grain in Vancouver, while another recently left port after waiting more than a month.
Shippers say the situation is unacceptable and damages Canada’s reputation as a reliable grain supplier.
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Deliveries of rail cars from the Prairies have fallen far behind schedule in recent weeks, and some grain shippers say there’s no immediate improvement in sight.
“It seems like there’s more ships in port than there are rail cars,” said Lach Coburn, manager of west coast operations for Cargill.
“It’s going to hell in a hand basket and we can’t get any answers. I get tired of trying to explain to customers what’s going on because I can’t.”
Ward Weisensel, chief operating officer for the Canadian Wheat Board, expressed similar concerns.
“We’re not close to a normal operating environment and we need to get there very quickly,” he said.
As of last week the board was two to three weeks behind its grain shipping schedule. As of Feb. 1, the board faced a shortfall of 1,235 rail cars from Canadian National Railway and 392 from Canadian Pacific Railway.
In the seven weeks ending Jan. 26, rail car unloads at Vancouver and Prince Rupert were down 11 percent from last year, despite a similar-sized sales program.
While the backlog hasn’t yet resulted in lost sales, demurrage charges are accumulating, the pipeline is becoming congested all the way back to country elevators on the Prairies and vessel operators and overseas grain buyers are unhappy.
Weisensel is reluctant to blame the railways, saying several weeks of bad weather at Vancouver, avalanches in the mountains and snowstorms and cold weather on the Prairies have created serious operational challenges.
But everyone needs to work harder to make up the shortfall.
“We realize these kinds of things can affect operations, but we need to recover as quickly as possible,” he said.
A CN spokesperson said the company is aware of grain service problems and said the company is working with customers and others involved in the logistics chain to restore traffic to normal levels.
“The cold, snow, the slides in British Columbia, all the things that Western Canada has seen in the past several weeks, are beyond anyone’s control and have had a major impact on all parts of the logistics chains, including road, rail and the ports,” said Kevin Franchuk.
He declined to discuss specific service issues, to provide statistics to indicate how far the railway has fallen behind its original shipping programs or to say what the railway plans to do to catch up, citing commercial confidentiality.
Weisensel said improved rail performance is essential if the board is to meet its recently increased export target of 19 million tonnes, including 13.1 million tonnes of wheat, 4.2 million of durum and 1.5 million of barley.
That’s 1.5 million tonnes more than the target set at the beginning of the 2006-07 marketing year and well above the 10-year average of 16.9 million tonnes.
Achieving that target will depend to a large extent on receiving adequate and reliable rail service, said Weisensel, who added he’s optimistic the situation will improve.
Coburn is more skeptical, saying things won’t really get better until the railways are made more accountable for their performance.
“There just doesn’t seem to be any accountability, responsibility or commitment,” he said. “If you don’t perform, someone needs to do something about it.”
He added that given the costs incurred by vessel owners, the problems at Vancouver could make them reluctant to do business at the port in the future.
