CN, grain companies trade backlog rebukes
MONTREAL — Canadian National Railway says it is making progress to meet the federal government’s target of increased grain shipments, but the railway drew a rebuke from Western Canadian grain elevator companies after calling on them to “step up” their own performances.
“The fact that CN is making this comment is just an attempt to deflect attention from the real issue,” said Wade Sobkowich, executive director of the Western Grain Elevator Association.
He said the main problems are getting enough cars from the railways at scheduled times and meeting contracts with customers in all four of the country’s four grain delivery corridors — Western Canada, Thunder Bay, the United States and Eastern Canada, not just the main West Coast and the Great Lakes terminal in Ontario.
“It doesn’t make sense that they’re asking us to do a better job when we’re already performing,” he said in an interview.
CN argued that the grain must be moved to the most efficient and fastest transittime corridors to free up space for farmers to deliver grain to Prairie elevators and ensure they receive the cash they are owned by grain elevator companies as soon as possible.
It finds it “disconcerting” that the elevator association has said the railways want to move too many grain loads to the two main export centres, yet the West Coast is where there are many vessels waiting to be loaded and the shipping season at the Thunder Bay port is about to open.
“Having wrongly singled-out railways and unrealistically called for a neardoubling of rail car capacity since last fall, it is now time for grain elevators companies to step up to the capacity they claim to have, and do so in the corridors that will benefit Canadian farm- ers the most,” Mongeau said in a statement Monday.
With Transport Minister Lisa Raitt and Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz leading the way, the federal government passed an order-incouncil on March 7 that imposes a daily fines of up to $100,000 on CN and rival CP should they fail to dou- ble the volume of grain shipments.
CN said it provided 5,102 hopper cars for loading last week, the most in its history at this point of the season.
Calgary-based Canadian Pacific said it is not disclosing the weekly grain car numbers it has been reporting to federal officials.