B.C. farmers are worried about what will happen to the supply chain if 9,000 unionized rail workers walk off the job on Thursday.
After talks broke down, workers with Teamsters Canada Rail Conference are expected to be off the job, bringing the country’s rail system to a halt and disrupting a key link in the supply chain for almost everything.
“The impact of a rail strike with grain coming down from Fort Saint John, Dawson Creek areas in northern B.C. is going to have a huge financial impact on the growers that are farming up in that area,” Ian Paton, MLA for Delta-South and the agriculture critic for the BC United Party, told Global News.
“But it’s got a huge impact also for the rest of the province and the Fraser Valley, where we use this grain and legumes to be made into cattle feed, for poultry, for dairy, cattle, for whatnot. So no grain coming down to the coast means we’re going to end up with a shortage of feed for everything from dog food, cat food, poultry, hogs and dairy farms as well.”
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Hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes of grain and legumes are moved by train each week.
Paton said the shutdown will also affect farmers in northern B.C. because they don’t have storage for a buildup of grain and legumes.
“It’s a huge liability to the grain farmers in the north,” he said.
“They’re even saying to me, we need to become an essential service, so that rail strike cannot impede the flow of our food and grain products from the northern B.C. to the rest of the world for export and for use here in British Columbia.”
A work stoppage would also pose a major problem at the Port of Vancouver, where two-thirds of goods are moved by rail.
Some ships are already being diverted away before the stoppage begins.
CN Rail and Canadian Pacific Kansas City have both issued lockout notices to workers after weekend negotiations stalled.
Key issues include rules on rest and fatigue, safety concerns and CN’s proposed forced relocation plan.
“People need to understand how huge our agricultural area in British Columbia is in the northern areas of the country — Dawson Creek, Fort Saint John, Chetwynd, areas like that,” Paton said.
“So we depend hugely on peas, legumes of different sorts, canola, wheat, barley, oats that come down here that are used by our bakeries, they’re used to make feed for cattle. And it’s going to be another hit to our agricultural industry if there’s a major rail strike.”
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