The Canadian Transportation Agency won’t get a chance to experience June in Saskatoon after all.
Public hearings into CP Rail’s grain-hauling performance will move to Ottawa beginning June 1, the CTA announced last week.
The agency has been encamped in Saskatoon since March 31, hearing the Canadian Wheat Board’s complaint over railway service in the winter of 1996-97.
Daniel Lavoie, CTA director of communications, said the agency isn’t abandoning Saskatoon by choice.
“The real reason as far as I know is there are no hotel rooms,” he said in an interview from the agency’s Ottawa headquarters.
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The agency had originally expected the hearings would last five or six weeks and booked space accordingly. By the end of May they will have been running for nine weeks and still won’t be done.
CP will likely have several days of testimony to present and the wheat board may want to call rebuttal witnesses. That will be followed by a day or two of closing arguments.
The hearings were held in Saskatoon mainly because the agency wanted them accessible to those most directly affected by last winter’s grain shipping problems.
Lavoie said that has been accomplished because farmers and members of the public have had an opportunity to appear before the agency while it has been in Saskatoon. The agency is required by law to rule on the board’s complaint by June 30.
