The good old days weren’t always so good if you were an elevator manager, or especially an elevator manager’s assistant. You had to be pretty handy with a shovel when you were loading a boxcar. Then you had to “cooper” those cars before shipment, sealing the doors with kraft paper and wooden or metal “grain doors.” When they arrived at a terminal, they had to be unloaded with Bobcats, or dumpers that lifted them on their side, after which the rest was swept out by workers with brooms.
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As late as the early ’80s, there were still plenty of boxcars in the system, most of which went through Thunder Bay. In July 1984, all those boxcars were being shipped from 2,883 primary elevators in Western Canada. Today there are 333 primary elevators, and most of the “inefficient” branch lines on which all those elevators used to sit have been abandoned.
Given these figures, you might expect that the grain-handling system in July 1984 was a logistical nightmare. But in the last week of that month at the close of the 1983-84 crop year, the terminals at Thunder Bay unloaded 9,672 cars. At the same time, Vancouver was unloading another 3,000-plus cars per week.
In the last quarter of 2010, average weekly unloads – all ports – were 5,958 cars. All hoppers. Most shipped from high-throughput elevators. All shipped with the benefit of computerized traffic management. And all shipped with farmers paying full freight, unlike back in 1984 when they had the Crow benefit.CN’s share of those cars delivered in the last quarter of 2010 represented only about 80 per cent of promised performance, and in recent weeks CN has struggled to meet 70 per cent.
Those figures were presented last month in a speech in Winnipeg by CN president and CEO Claude Mongeau, who asked the grain industry to “embrace change.”
It is difficult to imagine just how much more change the grain industry can stand, let alone “embrace.”
Accompanying the changes outlined above were the collapse of the Prairie grain co-ops, along with a considerable amount of farmers’ equity, largely because of excess capital investment in building the kind of elevator system that the railways said they wanted.
In addition to paying full freight rate, farmers have had to pay the huge extra cost of trucking to those fewer and more-distant elevators. Taxpayers have had to pay the resulting road-repair bills, and then there is the small matter of what future generations will think of us ripping up energy-efficient railways and sending the scrap steel to China.
If Mr. Mongeau wants another example of change, he need only look at what farmers and the industry have done with cropping and marketing. While yields have increased since the 1980s, they are yields of lower-yielding crops such as canola and pulses, and more crop is now never seeing an elevator, and going for feed or processing.
The result is that railways are being asked to do less work, not more. Average primary elevator shipments for the 1980s were actually higher than from 2000 to 2010. As for suggestions that more identity-preserved or special crops make the job more complicated, not necessarily. Nowadays there is more canola and peas, which have fewer grades than wheat.
We’ll give Mr. Mongeau the benefit of the doubt. He came to Winnipeg to promise to try to do better, and according to wheat board and grain trade officials, he’s been more cordial and cooperative than his predecessor. They say CN has been improving its performance.
That said, chatting with them reminds me of the story (probably not true, but a good story) that ladies in the court of Louis XIV used to carry pet baboons. Why? Next to a baboon, anyone looks beautiful.
In this case, CP is the baboon. The word is that CN is bad (but trying harder), while CP is dreadful.
While Mr. Mongeau is on one hand appearing co-operative, on the other he talked about how “regulations” are not the solution. That’s code for getting rid of the rate cap, and calling off any action on a rail service review. And he consciously or unconsciously reinforced the fact that the railways have the most powerful lobby in Ottawa, noting that one of his first visits after being appointed president was to Prime Minister Harper.
Clearly, that visit didn’t disabuse Mr. Harper, Agriculture Minister Ritz and many Prairie MPs from the notion that problems with rail service are some figment of the wheat board’s imagination, and that no one else is complaining. This is nonsense. If nothing else, poor rail service has done one remarkable thing, which is to unite the entire grain industry in solidarity.
For the last 30 years, the railways have had it all their way. They’ve been allowed to charge variable rates. The Crow is gone. The Western Grain Transportation Act is gone. Most of the branch lines are gone. Most of the elevators are gone.
Every time the grain industry agrees to the changes the railways ask for, they do a worse job. It’s time to stop embracing change. The numbers prove it. We were better off with branch lines, wooden elevators and boxcars. [email protected]
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JOHN MORRISS
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
