Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for the opportunity to present to this committee.
I'm here today to explain how poor rail performance affects my industry, my community, and my family business, and why we need Parliament to take immediate action.
I and my wife Lisa and my brother and my sister-in-law together farm 8,300 acres of grains and oilseeds in northeast Saskatchewan. I am also vice-president of the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan.
We farm about as far from port as you can get, and in an average year our farm pays $360,000 in freight to get our products to our customers. The backlog of grain in the Prairies has had a huge effect on the ability of producers to cash-flow their operations and is making things extremely difficult for farmers going into their most expensive season. In the northeast, we are sitting with 3-month-old grain contracts undelivered due to the shortage of timely and sufficient railcar service to the elevators. At the end of February, personally, we were sitting with an outstanding wheat contract from December that we had been unable to deliver. This was leaving us in an extremely tough financial position. Luckily, our local elevator, which is one of only four in Canada that are serviced by both CN and CP, found some room to take our product and help us out. They didn't have room to take the entire contracted amount, but just enough to give us the money we needed at that time. We don't get paid on a contract until we deliver, and these delays place financial and personal stress on us as producers for something that shouldn't be a concern.
Two of the short lines that operate in northeast Saskatchewan have also felt the pinch of the lack of rail service this season. They have had a very poor and inconsistent supply of cars this shipping year, and this problem started in October, long before winter showed up again in Canada. They have also had several cases of cars that have been loaded and then not picked up for weeks. Producers do not get paid for the product loaded in these cars until it is received by the end user, so this is again placing unnecessary financial and mental stress on producers.
A lot of the highly sought-after oats grown in northeast Saskatchewan are loaded on these short lines in either dealer or producer cars. I grow 2,200 acres of these oats every year, and with poor rail service the market for these oats is in jeopardy. The processors need to find alternative sources for their oat supply, since our railroads have dropped the ball on shipping our product in a timely manner. My little boys want their oatmeal most mornings. I want that to be Canadian oats from Tisdale, not oats from Australia.
The rail issue isn't just affecting grain deliveries. Our local fertilizer dealer has been trying to put fertilizer in place for us, its customers, since last fall. Due to rail logistics, they have to pull fertilizer by truck out of Redwater, Alberta, instead of Clavet, Saskatchewan. That's an additional 1,000 kilometres per trip. So far this season, they have had to pull roughly 60 loads of fertilizer from Alberta, and that is only half of the product they require. If things continue like this, we are looking at an additional 120,000 kilometres of trucking freight. That's added manpower, truck power, wear and tear on the roads and equipment, costs, and carbon emissions that we as the end users are going to have to pay for. Spring road bans will be coming into effect very soon, and we could be short of fertilizer in western Canada to put in this year's crop. All of this is due to poor management and planning on the side of the railroads.
Farmers need to get the rail service that we pay good money for. Bill C-49 was drafted because of the disastrous shipping season of 2013-14, and it's completely outrageous that we are even here today and talking about this again.
In closing, we need all parliamentarians, from both the House and the Senate, to come together and pass Bill C-49 for the sake of the shippers, the processors, the retailers, our economy, our farmers, and all Canadians. Farmers already deal with so many unreliable factors—weather, crop prices, input costs—but reliable rail service is something we should be able to depend on every year.
Thank you.