ESTEVAN, Sask. – Saskatchewan’s transportation system needs help at all levels, delegates to the recent provincial chamber of commerce convention were told.
Roads need to be repaired, trucking regulations need to be improved and rail competition must be increased, said representatives of various industries.
“We’ve got to bite our tongues and get on and get the problems fixed,” said Mike Chorlton, president of Saskferco.
He said there is no room for inefficiency and unreliability in his industry. Saskferco produces and ships large quantities of fertilizer.
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“If we can’t compete we’re out of business,” he said. “It’s critical, absolutely critical, that we have two competitive railways and viable railways competing to serve our needs.”
Rail competition will protect shippers’ interests, he said, and he called recent changes to the Canada Transportation Act “a major mistake” because they weakened competition.
Chorlton and Gavin Semple, president of Brandt Industries and a spokesperson for the Prairie Implement Manufacturers Association, both said Saskatchewan’s labor legislation must be amended so that short-line rail development can take place.
Semple also said a survey of implement manufacturers found concern over permits to haul oversized truckloads.
He said carriers of combines or grain bins are often fined for hauling double-stacked loads, while carriers of hay, operating under the same dimension permits, are not.
Semple said the need to have a vehicle in front and in back of an oversized load is also a burden, because this cost can exceed the value of what is being hauled.
He agreed regulations need to be standardized.
Lose money at border
“We have a good measure of consistency in allowable truck configurations and weights within the Prairies,” Chorlton said. “However as soon as we get to the U.S. border we have to use small, less efficient trucks and our cost goes up and our market niche goes down immediately as soon as you get an inch across the border. We need harmonization to get to more efficient levels.”
Mike Zalac, IMC-Kalium’s truck division manager who spoke for the mining industry, called on the province to put more money into the road system.
“We asked the provincial government to allocate more funds to improve secondary roads,” he said. “We don’t feel that it’s up to the shipper to pay for the roads. I think the government has a responsibility there.”
Russ Marcoux, president of N. Yanke Transfer in Saskatoon, said trucks are an easy target when people see the poor roads.
Rail-line abandonment and the loss of the Crow Benefit rail freight subsidy on grain have increased the size, but not necessarily the number of trucks, he said.
“A commercial super B unit hauls the equivalent of five to six legally loaded three-tonnes, and probably four to five actual three-tonnes and I can say that because I’m a farmer,” Marcoux said.
“So what you have is less travelling on the roads than what you had before and you’ve got travelling on the roads with, in the vast majority of cases, legally loaded units as opposed to farm units which traditionally don’t and haven’t loaded legally.
“The real problem with our road deterioration is that there hasn’t been any reinvestment in the maintenance and the upkeep.”
Similarly, Dennis Apedaile, assistant vice-president of government and public affairs with CP Rail, defended the railways for problems in grain transportation.
“There really is an urgent need for grain policy reform,” he said. “The status quo clearly does not work. We have a real hybrid system. It’s half regulated and half something else and it’s very dysfunctional.”
He said the real problem is inadequate accountability among many players.
“We have all kinds of grain there (Vancouver and Thunder Bay). We can’t get it unloaded,” he said. “We’ve realized in the last couple of months that we should not be measuring unloads any more. We should be measuring deliveries.
“We think the (Canadian Wheat) board should buy the grain at the ports and that’s going to be the big issue over the next year and a half.”
