The federal government’s transportation review has taken a wrong turn, says the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities.
The association has written to transport minister David Collenette to complain that the crucial question of roads is getting short shrift.
“We’re just five weeks from our final meeting and we haven’t even started on the roads issue yet,” SARM president Sinclair Harrison said in an interview last week.
The issues of road impacts, ports and hopper car ownership were left out of the review being led by Arthur Kroeger. Instead, they are being reviewed by a separate committee under the direction of Transport Canada.
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But Harrison says that so-called parallel process is “lagging sadly behind”, especially on road impacts, a major concern for rural municipalities.
“They’re supposed to feed information back into the Kroeger working groups so they can use that information in order to help in their decision-making process,” he said. “But there’s nothing going on and that concerns us.”
He said the much-talked-about railway “savings” come at the expense of the road systems and represent a shifting of costs to provincial and municipal governments, which must deal with increased road damage from grain trucking.
Kroeger said the roads issue must be dealt with separately because there are questions of federal and provincial jurisdiction to be sorted out.
And he said he doesn’t think the lack of information on road impacts will prevent his committees from dealing with the issues like car allocation, the role of the Canadian Wheat Board, access to rail lines and railway revenues.
“You can work on these things without knowing how much money is going to put into roads,” he said, adding the parallel process is proceeding as it should.
