‘Hoping for a timely and fair resolution,’ White House says of CP Rail labour dispute
WASHINGTON Canada’s reputation as a reliable trading partner for the United States suffered another black eye Monday as Americans awoke to a new kink in the bilateral supply chain: a labour dispute at CP Rail that left more than 3,000 employees off the job for a second straight day.
By dint of sheer coincidence, a host of Canadian elected officials and business leaders, including Ontario Premier Doug Ford, happened to be in the U.S. capital on a variety of missions, one of them being the ongoing effort to shore up the Canada-U.S. trade relationship.
For Flavio Volpe, the outspoken head of the Auto Parts Manufacturers’ Association, the goal had been to mitigate the damage Canada’s reputation as a reliable supplier suffered during last month’s weeklong blockade of the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ont.
“Tough timing,” Volpe tweeted ruefully about the dispute, which he said he heard about on two separate occasions within an hour of landing in D.C. “We need to resolve this ASAP.”
Business Council of
Canada president and CEO Goldy Hyder was also in town less than two weeks after an earlier spate of meetings on Capitol Hill - meetings in which he said U.S. lawmakers and counterparts were more worried about the prospect of a rail strike than anything else.
In those meetings, “I heard very clearly that the residue of the Ambassador Bridge episode was deeper than we perhaps realized — there was a high degree of frustration with allowing that to have happened,” Hyder said in an interview.
“The risk of a (rail) strike was identified as yet another area where they would be concerned because the inflationary pressures that would be caused on Americans would be felt pretty quickly.”
Asked about what specific commodities prompted the most concern, “Oil, oil and oil were the first three,” Hyder replied. “What I heard from them primarily was oil and food.”
Some US$27.6 billion worth of commodities from Canada entered the country by rail in 2021, data from the U.S. Department of Transportation shows. That includes more than 24 million barrels of Canadian crude oil during the last six months of 2021, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Energy Information Association.
It was clear from certain corners of the Biden administration Monday that the prospect of a drawn-out labour dispute at CP Rail is a troubling one.
One White House official said the administration is “closely monitoring the situation” and taking part in “extensive conversations” with the federal government in Ottawa — with a particular focus on the negotiations between CP Rail and the union, as well as the impact on supply chains.
“We are all hoping for a timely and fair resolution that benefits both parties and both countries,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity in keeping with standard White House practice.
“It is important to remember that the parties continue to actively negotiate and a Canadian federal mediator is fully engaged so we hope that the rail service will resume quickly.”