Rail rates go up, performance does not

Kill the Crow, have farmers pick up the full tab for moving their grain to port, and grain transportation problems will be a thing of the past.

That’s what the government and so-called “progressive” farm organizations were telling us short years ago.

The Crow is dead, farmers are paying more to ship their grain, transportation problems still plague us. And the government seems unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

CN and CP point to cold weather on the Prairies and heavy snowfall in the mountains as reasons why they haven’t been able to deliver prairie grain and why farmers will be paying $15 million or more in demurrage.

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The railway’s excuses are lame at best, unacceptable at worst. Cold weather on the prairies and heavy snowfall in the mountains are facts of life in Western Canada, something that happens every year. If they are right when they say that cold weather limits the number of grain cars they can haul in one train, they should run more trains. If they need to, the railways can lease locomotives, and cars, to do the job. That they have not already done so is unacceptable, since they have known since mid-summer that they would, in all likelihood, have a large crop to get to market.

Most of all, it is unacceptable that farmers have to pay, and pay dearly, while at the same time Canada’s reputation as a reliable supplier of grain is damaged.

Federal agriculture minister Ralph Goodale, who has also said he does not favor monetary penalties against the railways, said last week that he wants to see “the right kind of penalties” for underperformance and incentives for being ahead of schedule. There was no indication what “the right kind of penalties” might be, but it is hard to see how there can be effective penalties without cash payments being involved.

With the end of the Crow, and with deregulation and privatization, farmers were supposed to have more power in the handling of their grain.

That hasn’t happened. Instead, farmers, a captive market for the railways, given the high costs of trucking grain to port, appear to have less clout than ever.

Farmers are paying out of their pockets. The railways should have to do the same.

With a federal election in the offing this year, it is past time for farmers and their organizations to put extreme pressure on the federal government to make it so.