Manitoba farmers are contending with growing concerns following a strike at the St. Lawrence Seaway, leaving the trade route closed since the weekend.
The seaway sees 11 million metric tons of grain shipped from the Prairie region every year. With about 360 union workers now off the job, local farmers are left worrying about the fate of their harvest.
Brenna Mahoney, general manager of Keystone Agricultural Producers, said farmers depend on selling their products in a timely manner. She said 40 per cent of all cargo on the seaway is grain-related products, a majority of which comes from Western Canada. She further noted that Manitoba farmers rely on exports of their grain, and the seaway plays a critical role in getting that done.
“(Farmers) have to get it off the farm, to the elevator, to sell it to the market. By not having the place to do that, or having backlogs and bottlenecks, it prevents farmers from being able to flow their goods,” Mahoney said. “It’s really important to have these sectors of export up and running as fast as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
Farmers, Mahoney said, don’t have a lot of space and ability to store their grain, only what she called a temporary holding place. And if the grain can’t be exported, it ultimately means producers won’t get to put their product out to market.
Barry Prentice, a professor of supply chain management at the University of Manitoba, said supply tends to be shipped following the harvest season. He said the peak of the cargo comes in the fall months, either in October or November, and can even go into December.
Prentice said the St. Lawrence Seaway can obtain a waiver to continue shipping grain through the strike. That move, he said, would require the union to accept it as well.
This latest labour disruption comes as the economy is still feeling the impacts of the Port of Vancouver strike this summer. Various industry groups have called for a quick resolution.
“(The seaway is) certainly a politically important commodity,” Prentice said. “They might be willing to do this knowing that the government might be a little more hard-line if they get the pressure of farmers on their back.”
But if the flow of grain halts completely, the global economy may feel it as well. According to Prentice, it’s never a good thing when exports get stopped.
Mahoney added that Canada’s reputation as a reliable supplier could be threatened once international consumers look to other markets. The impact on the national agriculture industry ends up, she said, impacting the province’s agricultural sector.
“Canada has been able to very quickly fulfil the global need for grain because of our supply. If we short-stop that ability to get our grain to market, it’s making a bad situation, globally, worse,” Mahoney said.
She further added that if consumers look elsewhere for grain, Canada’s recovery will be a longer-term process — a process that would result in knock-on effects on the economy for years to come.
— with files from Global’s Katherine Dornian
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