REGINA — Grain Growers of Canada spent the first week of the fall parliamentary sitting lobbying for the Port of Vancouver to be on the federal government’s list of major projects.
Executive director Kyle Larkin said grain farmers weren’t necessarily expecting the port to be on the list but had hoped for at least a mention.
He said the omission is “a pretty glaring oversight, since the port of Vancouver is not only extremely important for the grain sector, but obviously extremely important for the Canadian economy.”
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The Wheat Growers Association also called for investments to ease port congestion.
Prime minister Mark Carney released the government’s top five projects deemed nationally significant Sept. 12. They include the Port of Montreal container terminal project and a copper and zinc mine in Saskatchewan. All five are at the final stages of approvals and ready to go.
However, he also listed planned projects considered “transformative” for Canada, and that list includes Port of Churchill Plus. The project would upgrade facilities at the port, expand trade corridors by building an all-weather road, upgrade the rail line, create a new energy corridor and have ice-breakers in Hudson Bay.
Larkin said he had meetings planned last week to advocate for investment at Vancouver.
“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us this fall to make sure that the government understands how important that port is to the grain sector, but also how it’s the largest port in Canada and how it benefits the Canadian economy and Canadians at large,” he said.
More than half the grain grown in Canada is exported through Vancouver and accounts for $35 million in daily exports. Larkin said the infrastructure that allows that to happen is inadequate.
The organization’s main priority is the Second Narrows bridge, built in 1969. It connects the south and north shores at the port. About half of the grain terminals are on each side.
“The challenge we’ve heard from the grain sector at the Port of Vancouver is the increased traffic going through that channel causes it to be a logistical nightmare,” said Larkin.
“If that bridge were ever to fail, you would have about 50 per cent of the grain terminal capacity at the Port of Vancouver out of commission for the foreseeable future.”
Second Narrows, along with the New Westminster rail bridge, built in 1904, is a choke point at capacity.
“We need to replace this bridge, create something that brings us to the 21st century and that can circumvent the challenge of having increased traffic through the channel because that traffic’s going to increase even more now,” he said, due to the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion terminal.
Larkin said the port, railways and grain companies all face the challenges daily and it’s time to invest.
Otherwise, Canada faces falling behind compared to international competitors who have built trade-enabling infrastructure in the last 25 years or so, he said.
Meanwhile, he said grain farmers and shippers say there is excess capacity at Thunder Bay that already exists and logistical challenges to using Churchill.
“It’s not something that at least our grain shipping companies are interested in,” he said of Churchill.
“Obviously it can only be used a certain time of the year and the route to get there is geographically challenging, and then the route out of it through the Hudson’s Bay is even more geographically challenging, so I can see why grain companies would be reticent to spend a significant amount of capital in building something there when they already have infrastructure built at the port of Thunder Bay that’s not being used at 100 per cent.”
