If the Farmer Rail Car Coalition fails in its bid to convince Transport Canada to turn over ownership of 13,000 federal hopper cars to it, Saskatchewan taxpayers and prairie grain farmers who fund the Canadian Wheat Board will be out some money.
FRCC vice-chair Jim Robbins told the House of Commons agriculture committee Nov. 23 that the Saskatchewan government and the CWB have helped the coalition maintain itself during the past eight years through loans.
Western Diversification also has lent federal money to the coalition.
And if the coalition does not get the cars, the money will not be paid back.
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“If the business plan does not go forward, the arrangement is that the loans will be forgiven,” he told Saskatchewan Conservative MP Gerry Ritz.
The MP said the CWB’s financial stake in the enterprise, and the possibility it could lose money, should be an issue in wheat board elections now under way.
Robbins said in a later interview the amount of the loans is confidential.
Saskatoon lawyer Doug Richardson, counsel to the coalition, said any money advanced to the coalition is minuscule compared to government support for the railways over the years, including hundreds of millions of dollars in CN Rail debt written off when the former crown corporation was sold to private investors in the 1990s.
Robbins told Ritz that the Saskatchewan government “has loaned us money so we can do things like the business plan and has contributed some money as well.
In the case of the CWB, they have loaned us some money so we can operate, maintain an office, live through the eight and a half years that this process has taken.”
He said if the cars are transferred to the coalition, the loans will be repaid from business revenues “when we’re up and running.”
