CHURCHILL, Man. – Ice is spreading across ponds here and the end of the shipping season is nigh.
A chill wind is also said to be blowing through the hearts of many local people out of fears about the future of their port.
Anxious town, port and railway officials say they want Ottawa to leave the Canadian Wheat Board’s monopoly on export sales of wheat and barley alone or they see a frosty future ahead for this port, which exports grains from northeastern Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Read Also
Canola support gets mixed response
A series of canola industry support measures announced by the federal government are being met with mixed reviews.
“We’re very worried about changing the foundation of the wheat board, and what the board is,” said Michael Ogborn, managing director of OmniTrax Inc., the company that owns the port corporation and the rail line leading to the distant community on Hudson Bay.
“In the United States we have a saying: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We don’t think the wheat board is broken. We think it’s working very well.”
Town mayor Michael Spence said local people are worried that their economic future may be jeopardized by a farm policy battle into which they have little input.
But they aren’t happy the federal government has ignited the issue.
“We’re taking it as a threat,” said Spence, who met with reporters visiting the town on a trip organized by the wheat board.
“If dual marketing came along, all of a sudden (grain exports from Churchill) will drop to half and that brings into question the viability of the port and the viability of the railway, and that challenges the viability of the community.
“It’d be hard to recover from.”
Recently Louis Dreyfus Canada president Brant Randles, a member of the Churchill Gateway Development Corp. said the dual marketing versus single desk issue will have little impact on Churchill.
Regardless of the marketing system, grain will continue to flow through Churchill because it’s often the cheapest way to export grain to Europe and elsewhere.
“It will still have the advantages it has today,” said Randles.
Whether crops like wheat and barley are marketed through a single desk structure or through unregulated competition won’t change the economic value of Churchill, which is real and will survive any marketing system changes, he said.
But Bill Drew, the Gateway executive director, said non-board grain shipments have never come close to wheat board shipments and the grain companies have shown little interest in using the port.
“Any non-board shipper who wants to put 500,000 or 600,000 tonnes through the port can phone me any time,” said Drew.
“Most grain companies have their own facilities either in the St. Lawrence Seaway or in Vancouver. They have an economic incentive not to direct their sales through Churchill.”
Since taking over the railway line from The Pas to Churchill, a line Canadian National Railway said was nonviable, Omnitrax has invested in upgrading both the line and the port.
But Ogborn said his company feels anxious about any big capital spending now because of the uncertainty that the federal government’s moves have created.
“It’s a razor’s edge sort of thing,” he said.
“Uncertainty is not a good thing for capitalists.”
