Teamsters, IBEW serve Canadian Pacific with strike notice

Commodity shippers fear further disruptions in getting their products to market after two unions representing about 3,400 workers at Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. served 72-hour notice of their intent to strike on Wednesday.

The notices come at a difficult time for the railway, which is under pressure from shippers to move backed-up grain shipments after a difficult winter and supply more locomotives to the pipeline-constrained oil industry in Western Canada.

“The disruptions we saw in Q1 this year and even at the end of last year were incredibly significant,” said Greg Northey, director of industry relations with Pulse Canada, a member of the Ag Transport Coalition. “A strike on CP would obviously be an order of magnitude kind of disruption to the movement of grain ... it would just exacerbate the problems we’ve had.”

He said rail shipping of grain has been better recently, but still not satisfactory, with shippers reporting Canadian National Railway supplied 83 per cent of demand and CP Rail at 53 per cent of demand in the week of April 2-8.

A CP Rail work stoppage would also be “extremely detrimental” to the member companies of the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada who rely on rail to ship about 80 per cent of their products, CEO Bob Masterson said in an open letter to federal Labour Minister Patty Hajdu.

“The impacts of a CP strike would be immediate, severe, and long-lasting as there are no viable alternatives for shipments,” he wrote.