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WESTERN PRODUCER — Farmers can feel like they’re a badly bashed patch of turf whenever the three elephants of the rail system — the railway companies, the unions and the government — lock tusks and fight for dominance.

Despite that feeling, Canada’s most seasoned grain transportation academic, Barry Prentice of the University of Manitoba’s Transport Institute, said farmers generally benefit from a highly efficient system.

“It’s hard to see it, but if you look at the amount of freight moved per employee in North America, we do very well,” said Prentice in an interview as the trains began moving again following the two-railway shutdown that ended Aug. 25.

However, Prentice said this shutdown of both national railways, aborted by the federal government’s order sending the labour-management dispute to binding arbitration, shouldn’t stop people from expecting the system to operate better.

No simple solutions seem obvious for rapid productivity improvements across the system, but he thinks more profound innovations could substantially boost performance.

This current labour dispute revolved around “fatigue” provisions and how workers and management are allowed to operate within federal labour provisions. With railways being 24/7/365 systems operating in isolated and challenging environments, all sorts of unique working arrangements need to be negotiated by union and management. The situation is complicated by the federal regulations, which limit the agreements they can make.

Prentice wonders why engineers are required to be physically inside a train’s locomotive instead of working from a command centre like many other parts of the system. If engineers and other on-train staff could work within a city or town, near their homes and families, the railways should be able to staff, schedule and manage workers, and those workers should be happier.

That’s just one of many innovations Prentice thinks could improve grain transportation operations, and it could be possible in coming years.

A vexing challenge, but one that should be resolvable, is the “grain in the rain” problem at Vancouver.

Right now grain loading is often delayed for hours or days when it rains. To comply with union agreements and labour regulations, an elaborate assembly must be created to allow grain to remain dry while loading, and disassembled afterward. However, Prentice said other ports in rainy regions don’t seem to have the same degree of delay.

Surely that could be fixed, he says.

Farmers aren’t likely to see another major rail system built in Canada, but an existing neglected railway could offer a much needed third outlet for Prairie crops and commodities: the line to Churchill.

“Things have changed with climate change,” said Prentice, noting the average one-day-per-year extension of the ice-free season, the ability of modern icebreakers to keep Arctic passages open and growth of markets in places other than Asia.

Parts of the current line might need to be moved from muskeg and melting permafrost to rocky land, but that isn’t impossible. In fact it’s what was done when the national railways were built.

Prentice said Canada’s ports are also inefficient at container loading compared to the booming ports of Asia. Lessons should be learned overseas and implemented here.

His combination of a favourable view of the overall Canadian grain handling system’s efficiency but a belief that it could operate better is echoed in , in which he looked back over the 1995-2020 period.

“The past 25 years have seen dramatic changes.… It has brought about a higher level of efficiency to the movement of grain unprecedented in our country’s history, allowing for successive volume records to be set over the past five years (to 2020,)” wrote Hemmes.

“Yet there will always be a need for continued improvement.… In short, if Canada is not the best in the world at moving grain to its destination, we cannot adequately compete.”

Prentice hopes that this recently aborted shutdown goads all players in the industry to look at fundamental improvements that could boost grain handling efficiency, rather than forget about everything now that the dispute has ended. Disputes aren’t necessarily a loss if they provoke changes that make things better.

That is also the tone with which Hemmes completed his 2021 report.

“It is inevitable that the consternation between stakeholders in the (grain handling and transportation system) will continue far into the future, as it has for the whole of the industry’s more than 120 year history,” he wrote.

“This should not be viewed in a negative light, however, as it is likely it is the impetus for what has driven the great changes that have been realized, particularly over the past 25 years.”

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