Good afternoon.
My name is Jim Beusekom. I'm the president of Market Place Commodities. We're located in Lethbridge, Alberta. I'll give you a brief background of what we do. We trade grains, pulses and oilseed commodities produced by farmers in western Canada. Our market is threefold. We sell into the domestic feed market, which goes mostly to cattle and livestock production. We export to the United States, and we export by container to the Asian market, with the bulk of that container volume shipping to southeast Asia.
We source our commodities from farmers in western Canada in what we would typically refer to as supply surplus areas. The municipal districts, counties or rural municipalities across Alberta and Saskatchewan generally produce many more commodities than what they consume, meaning there's more available than we need for our domestic market. We ship this into export and international markets. We move these commodities from sellers to buyers, and we use third party logistics, such as truck, railroad and shipping container.
Most of our domestic trade is moving by truck logistics across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, with some help from rail when needed. When we export to the United States, we tend to ship, again, by truck or by a combination of trucking and rail. Typically, we truck it into the United States. From there, we access U.S. rail, such as BNSF, and it goes to destination markets in the United States that way. For overseas exports, we use all modes of transportation: truck to rail, rail to port, and then containers to the overseas markets.
It's much about logistics. To elaborate on these logistics, there are some areas that continually need to be reviewed and improved on. In trucking logistics, there are two areas of concern. One is a shortage of drivers. It's very difficult for trucking companies to expand and meet the need for customers today. We would like to suggest that we need to review and simplify the process to obtain a driver's licence in Canada. For example, it's more difficult and more expensive today to get a driver's licence to become a class 1 trucker than it is to obtain a small plane pilot's licence. You can actually do it more quickly and cheaply, I believe. The other thing is to potentially review insurance companies' requirements and guidelines for trucking companies.
The other problem we've had with trucking is past and current mandates required to cross the border to the United States. That's hugely impacted the number of truckers who are able to move product for us across the border. We're located roughly 100 kilometres from the United States, so going back and forth across the U.S. border is very normal.
With regard to rail logistics, we want to give credit where credit is due, and our experience with CP Rail.... Again, we're in the Lethbridge area, so we tend to use mainly CP Rail, and our working relationship with them has been good. They've made significant improvements in available equipment. In our case, it is moving intermodals by rail from Calgary to Vancouver. Shipment times are decent from the origin to the destination.
Areas of concern with rail are, of course, when there are derailments and natural disasters, as there were a year ago in interior B.C. These things all significantly impact shipping capacity. When those types of events happen, there are not a lot of options today for the rail lines to reroute around the problem areas. As a result, we are unable to get our product to the port.
The third is container and port logistics. This was discussed already, but our ability to get product to port is only as good as our ability to get it through port and onto vessels. Port congestion, lack of shipping lines coming into port, blank sailings, shortage of containers, and containers returning to Asia empty are all major issues and just a few things that we want to mention.
That, really, is a summary of my statement. Again, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to act as a witness at this committee.
Thank you.