OAK BLUFF, Man. (Staff) — The chief commissioner of the Canadian Wheat Board says the grain industry cannot afford any more strikes or lockouts at the West Coast.
“We can’t afford to shut down a multi-billion dollar industry for the sake of a few people,” Lorne Hehn told farmers meeting here last week. “I think we’ve got to do something about the situation.”
Hehn said the board has reduced its sales targets by one million tonnes to 25 million tonnes for the year because of the two-week-long stoppage last month. Based on the Pool Return Outlook for No. 3 CWRS, the grain he said is most affected, that’s an estimated $120 million that won’t go into the pool accounts this year.
Read Also
European wheat production makes big recovery
EU crop prospects are vastly improved, which could mean fewer canola and durum imports from Canada.
Those costs are in addition to $6 million in demurrage charges. Although the board is protected against demurrage charges for the strike’s duration, it must pay for delays in shipping after work resumes.
The board’s shipping program is about two months behind.
And with shrinking storage capacity and greater demands by customers for tailor-made shipments, Canada is shifting into a system where it delivers grain from the country to the port just in time to be loaded onto vessels, Hehn said.
Difficulty in restarting
“When you stop a just-in-time system you have one hell of a problem getting it started again.”
Hehn said he’d like to see a different arbitration system for labor contracts at the West Coast.
He favors a system of “first-offer selection” under which both parties file their first offers with an arbitrator prior to the start of negotiations. If they can’t reach agreement through the collective bargaining process, the arbitrator would select one offer or the other.
“I think that would bring people to the table in a more honest fashion,” Hehn said. “We could settle these things without shutting the system down.”
