SUPPORTERS of the Farmer Rail Car Coalition’s dream of controlling a 12,000 grain car fleet will be in a great funk this week.
Their anger will be directed at the Conservative government that killed the Liberal-FRCC deal.
It is misplaced. It mainly should be directed at the Liberals.
They had the better part of a decade to forge a deal and waited until the end was near, when a commitment to an agreement-in-principle would have to be implemented by the next government.
The failure of the FRCC deal was a failure of the indecisive last Liberal government. It was a failure of FRCC to recognize that they needed allies on both sides of the House of Commons and that the Liberals would not be there forever.
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To condemn the Conservatives for killing the deal is to condemn them for being true to the objections they laid out before the election. It would have been an amazing about face if the new government had suddenly found merit in the FRCC deal it had been skeptical of in opposition.
Of course, only the most mean-spirited of Conservatives and anti-FRCC farmers would not give the FRCC and leader Sinclair Harrison credit for exposing railway over-charging for rail car maintenance.
If not for the FRCC insistence that they could do car maintenance at close to one-third the cost claimed by the railways, the Canadian Transportation Agency would never have been ordered to investigate – an investigation that proved the point and led to the Conservative promise to lower the railway revenue cap by reducing the amount embedded for maintenance costs.
For 13 years under the Liberals who oversaw creation of the rail costing formula, the railways were compensated for tens of millions of dollars in car maintenance costs they were not incurring.
The FRCC, in its 10-year battle to get the cars, was instrumental in exposing it.
However, Conservatives are being disingenuous when they suggest their main objection to the FRCC-Liberal deal was the business plan.
It is true that by their nature, they favour simpler rather than more complex business rules and many Conservative MPs suggested FRCC car ownership would be one more layer in an already complicated grain transportation system.
But the real reason was the friends that the FRCC chose to keep.
It had among its charter members the National Farmers Union, no friend of the Conservatives. It had among its supporters and financial backers the Canadian Wheat Board, no friend of the Conservatives.
It had among its financial backers the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party government, no friend of the Conservatives. It had among its supporters prairie farm groups the Conservatives see as Liberal-friendly and there was an absence of conservative farm groups that would have given the proposal legs among Conservatives.
So the government found a middle ground. It accepted the FRCC analysis of railway rip-off but not the FRCC prescription on how to fix it.
The Conservative decision should be judged as much on its political payback quotient as its business plan rational.
And when Liberals rage about the Conservative sabotage of the FRCC dream, they should look in the mirror.
