After 32 days of public hearings, 7,000 pages of testimony and three months of deliberations, it all boiled down to one simple sentence.
“In other words,” the Canadian Transportation Agency said on page 36 of its 37-page decision, “there has been undue discrimination vis-a-vis CWB grain moving to Vancouver.”
With that, the agency found CP Rail guilty of pushing grain to the back burner in the winter of 1996-97, as it tried to recover from several weeks of severe winter weather that had thrown rail operations into chaos.
Read Also
Storm dynamics and extreme rainfall
Besides moisture, instability and orographic lift, the next biggest factor that contributes to heavy or extreme rainfall is storm dynamics.
The Sept. 30 ruling brought to an end a complaint launched 18 months earlier by the Canadian Wheat Board. The decision was hailed as a major victory by most farm organizations and by the board, which vowed to seek financial compensation from the railway.
CP officials expressed disappointment, continued to deny there had been any discrimination and found solace in the fact that no formal orders or recommendations were issued against it by the agency.
In its decision, the agency said discrimination between different types of traffic may be perfectly valid, depending on the circumstances. But it noted that rather than offering reasons for discriminating against grain, CP simply denied doing so.
The way it works
CP spokesperson Ian La Couvee said the railway has no regrets about its strategy.
“We were intent on showing there was no discrimination,” he said, adding the rail company thought it was a given that different commodities would be treated differently. “They have to be. It’s the nature of the system.”
But the agency said that’s not a good enough excuse.
“While it was not possible for CP to fully meet the unload guidelines established by CAPG, a more appropriate allocation of the remaining railway capacity and available resources would have allowed CP to deliver more carloads of CWB grain to Vancouver during the period of the complaint,” it said.
Here are some of the key parts of the agency’s ruling:
- The unload guidelines set out by the Car Allocation Policy Group (an industry group that includes the railways and the board and divides rail cars among shippers each week) are a reasonable way of determining the level of service to be provided by a railway.
- Despite the best efforts of its front-line personnel, CP’s overall performance was “severely impaired” as a result of storms, blizzards and other weather-related disruptions, making it impossible for CP to meet the CAPG unload guidelines at the West Coast.
- The agency found CP breached its statutory service obligations in two areas: By discriminating against grain in the allocation of resources for moving commodities to Vancouver and by failing to supply cars for movement to the United States.
- There was no breach of service in respect of movement to Thunder Bay, Ont., or winter rail shipments to Eastern Canada.
- The agency issued no orders or remedies. It said it “expects” CP will be guided by its findings of discrimination, and said the U.S. car supply issue is covered by a commercial contract between the board and CP and should be dealt with accordingly.
- While the number of CP Rail cars unloaded at Vancouver between Dec. 2 and March 30 fell 11,356 cars short of CAPG guidelines, the evidence didn’t indicate how much of that was due to weather and how much due to discrimination.
- The agency declined the board’s request that it order CP to develop plans to deal with similar problems in the future and submit them to the agency for approval, saying that would represent an unwarranted degree of regulation over railway operations.
- Because it issued no orders, the agency was not required and did not make any finding regarding the commercial harm suffered by the board as a result of the service breach.
