SOLUTIONS NEEDED NOW
Over the past number of weeks, producers across Western Canada have watched as their politicians, the rail companies and the grain companies have pointed fingers and made excuses over the current transportation crisis. There is certainly more than enough blame to go around. However, what producers need and deserve are real solutions.
The Progressive Conservative Party of Saskatchewan has formally written a letter to both federal agriculture minister (Gerry) Ritz and transportation minister (Lisa) Raitt sharing three initiatives that they believe would provide immediate relief to the crisis and also begin the framework for a long-term solution.
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These ideas include: that the six amendments as proposed by the Shippers Coalition to Bill C-52, the Fair Rail Freight Service Act, be immediately reintroduced to parliament and passed.
Secondly, enhancing the mandate of Quorum Corp. (the rail transportation monitor) to include weekly mandatory reporting of the number of hopper cars both transporting agricultural products and number of cars that originated in Canada that are currently in the U.S.
And finally, given the fact that producers paid for former CWB hopper cars, that any of those unallocated cars be directed to short-line railways and producer loading sites to satisfy some of the backlog.
The time for more studies has passed. Frankly, the survival of producers and the entire economies of Saskatchewan and Western Canada depend on finding concrete solutions. The time to act is now.
Rick Swenson, leader,
PC Party of Saskatchewan,
Moose Jaw, Sask.
PROFIT UP, SERVICE DOWN
Politicians, some producers and farm leaders have very short memories.…
(The railways’) recent threat that grain would never move efficiently if they did not get more money is not the first time this has happened.
In the 1980s, the railways shifted to bull-low for a myriad of reasons but mostly because they did not want to upgrade their rail car fleet or serve branch-line elevators owned by farmers.
So, in order to speed up the transportation of grain, the federal and provincial governments gave into the bully tactics of the railways and purchased grain hopper cars to improve the capacity of the grain transportation system.
In the 1990s, the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association, under the banner Partners in Innovation, lobbied the federal government to get rid of the Crow rate.
Their rationale was that the system could become more efficient if the railways could charge more. It sure sounds like that mantra is back again coming out of the same group.
The question is, more efficient for whom?
To this date, the railways have not invested in hopper cars and locomotives as the WCWGA were suggesting they would back when they wanted the Crow gone. But the freight rates farmers pay have certainly gone up along with railway profits.
In the 2000s, the railways dropped over 4,000 workers, and many locomotives were sitting idle on the tracks.
This year, the railroads are on slow-down for the movement of grain in the West. Once again they are crying their business needs more money for grain movement as oil and potash shipments provide more income.
Again, the WCWGA is advocating that producers need to pay more to ship grain and this would solve the problem.…
In the past, the WCWGA were ready to put on their work boots and hard-hats to go to the ports to load grain anytime the union workers went on strike.
The WCWGA should stop working for the railways and give up on their antiquated theme that the solution to the grain transportation problem is to pay the railways more. They have been proven wrong by history several times already.
Eric Sagan,
Melville, Sask.
FAMILIAR SOLUTIONS
(Agriculture) minister (Gerry) Ritz’s government has thrown another simple idea out there: “Let’s just tell the railways to haul more cars for nine weeks and we will fine them if they don’t”.
Nice and simple — very “Gerry.” Perhaps it isn’t that simple.
Transportation and marketing might need to be highly synchronized, perhaps even “designed.”
For example, the railroad would deliver cars to elevators based on the elevator company’s recent market share of grain sales. Those cars would be filled with grain that matched the contract to be loaded at port in the near future.
Farmers would be given equitable delivery opportunities and the port price matched the price, minus costs and a reasonable handling tariff, (that) farmers received so they would deliver when the grain was needed.
Sound familiar? It should. It is what we had.
Wendy Manson,
Outlook, Sask.
RAILWAY MONOPOLY
In response to calls from the previously farmer controlled CWB for rail service review and costing reviews of the railways’ operations, the federal government stalled those requests and later brought forth the Fair Rail Freight Service Act, which was supposed to deal with the railways’ poor service. By all accounts this legislation is proving useless….
The federal government needs to play its role as a regulator and ensure shippers are treated fairly by the railways.
Why is it the federal government has no problem extending its authority over the railway workers through labour legislation but does not think it’s a responsibility of the government to ensure there is effective and efficient rail transportation provided to shippers in Canada?
Why is it that grain companies are expected to load grain trains at a certain time and place, or face penalties, and yet the train may arrive over a week late with no recourse to the grain company?
As a producer car loader, I am expected to load cars within a 24 hour period or face a demurrage charge of approximately $87.50 per day per car.
But yet if the cars sit loaded on my track for over two weeks, without being moved, the railways face no negative consequence.
The railways are unable to provide fair and equitable service to shippers, as they know full well nothing can be done about it in the present situation. It’s time the federal government took its duties seriously and got their heads out of the railways’ troughs.
It’s also funny that the federal Conservatives labelled the previously farmer controlled CWB as a monopoly, but yet the railways, who have more control over farmers than the CWB ever did, are not viewed as a monopoly.
But they are allowed to promote predatory pricing, unfair business principles, poor service, the ability to kill economical transportation routes and operate under legislation that is totally one sided in favour of the railways.
So much for standing up for farmers.
Kyle Korneychuk,
Pelly, Sask.
VOICE OF FREEDOM
I have been thinking a lot lately about freedom, so called.
Politicians are free to say our bumper crop is at fault for no grain cars, or very few, on the railways. Around here it’s the bumper crop of oil that’s on the railway.
A huge terminal was built last year, and the tanker trucks are pummeling the roads hauling oil to it to fill oil rail cars. It’s not the only one in the province.
Ironically, this terminal sits not far from the once busy, formerly farm group owned grain elevators.
Apparently, neither the railways nor our politicians saw this coming. They are free to wear blinkers, it seems. The railways are free to haul what they want.
This must be what the honourable Mr. (federal agriculture minister Gerry) Ritz meant by market freedom. It seems to me it’s the freedom to go bankrupt and the freedom to watch our world reputation, once something of which we could be proud, become even more tattered.
I suppose we still have the freedom to complain. Or do we? I no longer think so.
Most newspapers are now owned by big companies and if they don’t like a writer’s viewpoint or perceived politics, letters are simply ignored. Writers trying to express an idea or opinion are muzzled.
I am not the only person who has come to realize that increasingly freedom of the press is only for those who own the press.
Canada Post frequently has shot itself in the foot; newspapers and magazines are free to do the same. Interesting fact, however, is that they still feel free to take money for subscriptions and advertisements.
But writers are free to publish letters on the internet or to sell bulls or beauty products the same way. We will make our voices heard, one way or another.
C. D. Pike,
Waseca, Sask.
RITZ DOESN’T GET IT
The message from the majority of farmers to the federal agriculture minister has been ignored for a decade. Instead, he listens to a fringe farmer group with only a few hundred members.
This is the same farmer group who betrayed farmers when they opposed railroad running rights a decade ago in the Estey-Kroeger process. I’m referring to the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association.
Last year, leaders from the WCWGA were hand-picked by (Gerry) Ritz and friends to run the interim boards of Saskatchewan’s new wheat and barley commissions.
In November, farmers voted to choose permanent board members for these commissions. Ritz’s hand-picked appointees were democratically rejected. They were replaced by farmers who are well-known supporters of the now defunct CWB single desk.
Ritz had already destroyed the single desk against farmers’ wishes and that case is slowly winding its way through the courts.
Orderly marketing of grain by the former CWB has been replaced with Ritz’s new open market free-for-all.
Farmers are now caught in the middle of an unprecedented rail transportation debacle that is costing them hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ritz has decided instead to form a new transportation group to study the very problem that he himself created. To make matters worse for farmers, Ritz has again appointed people from the same railway friendly WCWGA to represent farmers in his new rail transportation study.
How unfortunate for real farmers that Ritz simply doesn’t get it.
Bill Woods,
Eston, Sask.
