A dispute between a group of producer car shippers in northeastern Saskatchewan and Canadian Pacific Railway has been sent to mediation.
Whether that qualifies as good news is still unclear, says a spokesperson for the farmers.
“It will all depend on what CP comes to the table with,” said Ron Shymanski of Choiceland, Sask. “We’re not too excited yet.”
The 25 farmers filed a level of service complaint against CP with the Canadian Transportation Agency on Dec. 17.
In the complaint, they asked the agency to order CP to provide rail cars to farmers who want to ship producer cars from three loading sites along the White Fox subdivision.
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The railway has refused, telling the farmers they can load cars at Nipawin, at the southern end of the branch line.
In their formal complaint, the farmers told the agency they would prefer to resolve the dispute through a more informal mediation process, rather than the legalistic, time-consuming and expensive complaint system.
The railway agreed, and last week the agency adjourned the level of service case and sent the case to mediation.
Details of the mediation process, including who will be the mediator and when a decision will be reached, had not been determined as of last week.
Shymanski said the farmers want to get the issue settled quickly so they can ship grain.
“We’ve been put off long enough,” he said. “They’ve ruined a good part of our crop year already, and really made things tough for us.”
In their complaint, the farmers told the agency they shipped 125 producer cars from three sidings along the White Fox line in 2001-02. No cars were shipped in 2002-03 because drought left them with insufficient grain to meet CP’s minimum 25-car train run.
This fall, with a good crop in the bin, orders were placed for 27 cars. However CP refused to provide cars, saying the locations on the White Fox line had been removed from its list of public loading sites, and citing the fact no cars had been shipped the previous year.
The farmers say all of the trackside infrastructure that was in place two years ago is still there and there is no reason that cars can’t again be loaded at those sites.
But besides that technical reason for refusing service, CP says it wants all producer cars from the area to be loaded at Nipawin, a larger railway centre closer to the main line.
The railway said that’s more efficient and cost effective and farmers would actually get better service by going to Nipawin.
In their complaint, the farmers say some of them would face a haul of more than 75 kilometres to Nipawin, which will not only cost them money but also make it difficult to meet the 48-hour loading requirement imposed by CP.
“Parliament has enacted legislation to ensure that a producer has a right to load his-her own product and CP has a common carrier obligation to carry that traffic,” the farmers said in their complaint.
“We believe that CP has failed to meet its responsibility in this regard in the White Fox subdivision.”
