I want to thank the committee for giving Ray-Mont Logistics the opportunity to speak in respect to the Canadian food supply chain.
To give you a bit of background about Ray-Mont Logistics, we're a 30-year-old company based in Montreal with a focus in the movement of containerized goods. We have three terminals strategically located in Canada—in Montreal, Vancouver and Prince Rupert—with an operating capacity of over 125,000 TEUs annually. We're an export-oriented company, having moved over one million TEUs over the last decade. We're vertically integrated, which allows us to collaborate with railroads, ocean carriers, transportation companies, port operators and customers simultaneously, and this gives us a unique perspective.
Our primary commodities are agricultural, plastic, resin and pulp, but agriculture has been at the root of our company's existence for the last 30 years. Pre-COVID, we moved approximately 2.5 million tonnes of agricultural products in containers for export.
The supply chain challenges to move agricultural products in containers have been tremendous over the last few years, and it must be noted that the early warning signs actually date back pre-COVID to the spring of 2019, with the emergence of blank sailings as a mechanism to control supply chain economics. However, the emergence of COVID in the spring of 2020, and the resulting supply chain events that followed, has created new challenges at every turn. It has led not only to disruptions of containerized agricultural exports, but to the supply chain having to readjust and reinvent itself at times.
Over the last few years, key areas of concern have been the aforementioned blank sailings; access to empty containers by select carriers; removal of historical vessel services or vessel allocation, which has resulted in seismic shifts of volume from west coast ports to east coast ports for agriculture; growing labour issues in every sector of the supply chain; and, most importantly, the fluctuating shifts on import movement, resulting in a perpetual pendulum effect on the supply chain readjustments. Examples of this are port and rail congestion, which happened after the first wave of COVID as imports surged seemingly without notice, and then changes to supply chain strategies on large import companies from just-in-time to just-in-case, which has subsequently placed additional pressures on warehousing and container storage capacity.
While we do see signs of improvement in the supply chain, there are many challenges that persist today and numerous areas for improvement to move agricultural products more effectively and efficiently.
Here are a few of the recommendations we have as an organization.
The first is to take an understanding that the shift in supply chain patterns could be long-lasting. We can't merely expect the supply chain to normalize fully and that the previous way of moving things will be sufficient. We have to come to a realization that this might be the new normal. We have to understand that element, and that what drove container growth in ocean containers over the last several decades, namely market share, has subsequently been replaced with a focus on financial stability and margins for most private businesses.
The second recommendation is that there must be a quick development of new and existing infrastructure to create surge capacity at multiple levels of the supply chain. These levels include port infrastructure and rail infrastructure, as well as transloading and logistics parks. To achieve this initiative, programs such as the NTCF will be required to encourage private firms to expand their supply chain capacities. The process must be streamlined to react quickly, as the emerging issues in the global supply chain are growing and developing more rapidly than Canada is keeping up with them.
The third element is that all levels of government must encourage and support supply chain development projects for the overall improvement of the Canadian supply chain and the economy as a whole. To give a personal example of this, Ray-Mont has been attempting for six years to expand the logistics footprints of our operations in Montreal, which would increase capacity here by 400%, only to be met with challenges from multiple levels of government. Had the project been developed from the outset, many of the challenges that currently plague agricultural exports through this corridor, as well as the supply chain as a whole, would have been absorbed by that expansion. Ultimately, supply chain inefficiencies lead to increased costs and inflation.
The fourth element is that we must engage with supply chain stakeholders at the highest level, and in particular with the shipping industry, to work with them on solutions and ask the critical questions. In saying this, I will stress that it's imperative to work with them and not against them, as ocean carriers are private companies making a choice to call Canadian ports. One illustration of this is the port of Montreal, for example, which has additional berthing capacity, but steamship lines are choosing not to call these ports.
As I referenced previously, we've seen the removal of historical services from the west coast in the past couple of years. Again, this is a choice. We must ask them why they are choosing to do this and why the capacity is being pulled from Canada. More importantly—