Recently, OmniTRAX, the owner of the Port of Churchill, said it was closing the port and that no grain shipments would be occurring for 2016. How could we have come to this point where a private company can dictate to farmers, and essentially to the whole nation, that a port outlet would be closed to export because of its financial needs?
Does anyone consider the benefits that farmers receive when shipping through the Port of Churchill? Who is looking out for farmers’ needs and their financial considerations? What about the financial needs of all the communities and businesses serviced by that northern rail line and port?
The media has overlooked who caused this problem. It was the government run by Stephen Harper and Gerry Ritz, former Minister of Agriculture, who caused this problem by destroying the farmer-elected Canadian Wheat Board (CWB). The CWB had a mandate to maximize revenue to farmers, which is why the CWB used the Port of Churchill to ship farmers’ grain to customers in the area. Most years, the CWB shipped 90 per cent of the grain that went out of Churchill, due to it making more money for farmers.
With the death of the CWB, the Port of Churchill dies as well. The reasoning is quite simple. Since none of the grain company oligarchs own the port terminal, they would rather use their own terminals where they can make more money for themselves. Ritz and his Western Canadian Wheat Growers shills knew the port would die, so they bribed the grain companies with a nine dollar-per-tonne incentive to ship grain through Churchill as a short-term cover-up after they killed the CWB in 2011.
With the incentive being discontinued and Ritz out of power, the grain companies, and specifically OmniTRAX, decided to pull the pin on the port. With the big grain companies refusing to use Churchill, one can’t necessarily blame OmniTRAX for shutting down the port due to the finances involved.
But what about everyone else’s finances? How does this fit with our national agricultural and transportation policy? Oh yeah, we don’t have one.
What about our national sovereignty of the north? Now we don’t even control our only northern deep-water port, and soon we won’t even have one!
If one looks for someone to blame for this wreck, one can clearly target the Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba Conservative governments, the Western Canadian Wheat Growers, the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM), the Hudson Bay Route Association, and the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan (APAS) for not opposing the Harper government in its destruction of the CWB. Everyone was told of the lost economic opportunities if this happened, and the loss of the Port of Churchill is only one of them.
The Saskatchewan Minister of Agriculture ‘eloquently’ said that maybe Churchill is a lost cause. I would say the only lost cause is our farm leaders.
Eric Sagan
Melville
