It was very sad news last night that OmniTrax is laying off most of the workers at its Churchill, Manitoba, grain elevator and handling facilities.
It’s terrible for the people relying on that seasonal job to help them through another year, awful for the vulnerable town and regional economy, and worrying for farmers and people who care about Canada’s grain industry. It’s a unique outpost of the Canadian farm economy, on the frontier of the arctic, haunted by polar bears, whales, and perhaps even sneaky Russian submarines.
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Worrisome drop in grain prices
Prices had been softening for most of the previous month, but heading into the Labour Day long weekend, the price drops were startling.
The reason for the layoffs appears to be low grain bookings for this coming shipping season, which ends in November when the arctic ice spreads across the passages leading to the Atlantic. That’s not hard to believe. Omnitrax appeared to want to be running the port full-out this summer, but grain traffic is hard to predict and often disappoints port operators.
Thousands of farmers have strong feelings for Churchill, most of them positive. It serves as an outlet when other export channels get clogged, even if it can only handle a tiny amount of grain and nothing near the volume of Vancouver or Thunder Bay. More importantly in farmer psychology, the port offers some relief from the terrible reliance Prairie farmers have upon two main ports, both accessed by two railways that often don’t seem to care much about the farmer’s situation. Churchill for decades has served as a forlorn hope for farmers to get more competition to move their grain, or at least to have more outlets for it, but few would want to see it disappear as a grain-shipping possibility.
Rather than delve deeply into the logistical issues of the rail line, global grain flows or the slow opening of the Northwest Passage, for today let me leave you with these feature stories I wrote a decade ago, when I visited the port to see the final grain shipment being loaded before the northern winter set in and the ice encased the sea. They’re about the people who work and run the port, and people like them are having a really bad day today.
It’s all in the family at northern port
Churchill benefits from late freeze
Broe’s northern gamble pays off
And here are some photographs of the Spences mentioned in the top story, from 2006:
