CN, Caisse partner on massive project
$5B plan for 800 kilometre-long track aims to serve Quebec iron-ore producers
It rated just a six-paragraph mention among hundreds of pages of Quebec government budget documents. But it will be one of Canada’s largest infrastructure projects when it gets off the ground – a multibillion-dollar effort to build a huge railway across an isolated stretch of rugged land and accelerate the province’s push into natural resources.
Canadian National Railway Co. and pension fund manager Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec are teaming up on an estimated $5 billion project to lay down a new track stretching 800 kilometres from the port of Sept Îles north past Schefferville into the mines of the Labrador Trough. The aim is to serve major iron ore producers like Cliffs Natural Resources and juniors like Adriana Resources Inc., as well as other current and potential miners, that are searching for a better way to get their Quebec-produced material to international markets.
The project is in its early stages but is expected to be completed by 2017 if talks underway with mining companies yield firm transport agreements. Once those commitments are reached, the railway will do a feasibility study.
CN estimated Wednesday that it will hire 1,000 new permanent employees, from signallers to engineers and maintenance staff, to staff the rail link. It hasn’t executed new construction of this magnitude in years.
Caisse officials talk about the project in terms of “nation-building” for Quebec.
They say it’s in the same vein as the James Bay power project of the 1970s, which vaulted the province into the big leagues of hydroelectric production.
“You have to go back to the 1950s to see a railway project of this scale” in Canada, said Jean-paul Viau, a railway historian based in Montreal.
That decade, the privately owned Cartier Railway was built to transport what is today Arcelormittal’s ironore concentrate from Mont Wright over 420 km to Port Cartier. Iron Ore Co. of Canada, majority-owned by Rio Tinto, also operates a 419-kilometre rail line from Labrador City to Sept Îles. It is not involved in the current negotiations, a spokesperson said.
Chinese investors, desperate to secure iron ore supply to make steel, are pouring money into greenfield iron ore projects in the Labrador Trough. In March 2009, stateowned Wuhan Iron and Steel Corp. plowed $240 million U.S. in Consolidated Thompson Iron Mines Ltd. just after the financial crisis.
Quebec, desperate to secure a steady stream of royalties from miners and hydrocarbon producers to help pay down its nearly $250-billion publicsector debt, last year launched an ambitious economic development plan of its northern territory called Plan Nord. It is pledging to build infrastructure in exchange for investment and equity stakes in resource projects.
Producers will pay the government $4 billion in mining royalties alone over the next decade, Quebec finance minister Raymond Bachand estimated in his 2012-13 budget on Tuesday.
That’s 14 times more than the value of the royalties it has banked over the previous 10 years, the minister said.
This new rail line is different from other Plan Nord projects in that it will be entirely privatelyownedandfinanced.the estimated $5 billion cost is split into half debt and half equity, with CN putting up two-thirds of the equity portion while the Caisse puts up one third, said Caisse spokesperson Maxime Chagnon.
For CN, the project represents a departure from typical transactions in that it normally wouldn’t take a partner for a deal like this.
The project was the railway’s initiative. Caisse chief executive Michael Sabia, a former chief financial officer of CN, has made no secret of the pension fund’s desire to invest in infrastructure to tap Quebec’s resource boom.
New shipment contracts on the line would generate annual sales of up to $1.3 billion for CN, Desjardins Securities analyst Benoît Poirier estimated in a research note, the equivalent of 14 per cent of the company’s 2011 revenue.
This article first appeared in Thursday National Post.