In agriculture issues tend to reoccur, many key ones never seeming to come to an end.
The issue of grain handling is certainly one that pops up over and over, with plenty of finger pointing in terms of who is to blame.
Depending on one’s view of the problem, the solutions offered can be widely different.
But in the end nothing that has been done has seemed to solve the problem, so once more some prairie farmers cannot ship grain.
And while those farmers struggle with the inability to get their grain to market who to blame becomes once again an overriding question.
There are really only two players to point the blame. There are the grain companies and there are the rail lines.
Grain companies naturally blame the railways for not getting the grain to port.
The grain companies are suggesting grain is not getting to port because the railways are not supplying rail cars that have been ordered.
That is not a new lament. Rail companies have been accused before of opting to haul other commodities, potash and oil as example, before grain, because they generate greater returns with those products than they do moving farmers’ grain.
But that may not be the case this time around.
The Canadian Transportation Agency audits the railways and looks at how much export grain they move annually. As of Dec 31, 2017, they reported railways moved 43.2 million tonnes of grain to port, up 6.9 percent compared to 2016.
But the issue of grain getting to market too slowly persists.
There are now more people pointing a finger at the grain companies, suggesting they use the supposed rail car shortages as a way to offer farmers lower prices which of course would push up their returns.
There are those who use the issue to lament the loss of the Canadian Wheat Board. That card is long out of the deck, but the CWB did provide an over guiding hand that was supposed to ensure the overall system returned the maximum amount of money to farmers organizing grain shipments to maximize the shipping capacity of the overall system.
Without a single entity in control players within the system have the potential to point fingers at one another, to their own benefit with farmers left holding the bag.
And the issue of course gets kicked to the federal government to play referee through legislation. That avenue has been gone down before. The feds offer up a hammer through legislation that works for a while until someone figures out how to slip through a loophole.
The latest effort by the federal government is new transportation legislation, claiming that Bill C-49 will offer a mechanism to punish the railways for neglecting grain shipments.
The likelihood of Bill C-49 accomplishing long-term, stable transportation of grain is sadly slight, and farmers will still be left dealing with at least intermittent grain delivery issues.
Calvin Daniels is Editor with Yorkton This Week.
