Evidence of meeting #109 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was border.
Regional Director General, Southern Ontario Region, Canada Border Services Agency
I certainly would agree with your statement in terms of the need for us to sit down to harmonize the border in order to have an efficient border crossing.
The way we've always looked at the border, especially in an operational sense, is the border is one border with two countries. We treat it as one border, so where we can harmonize, it is the best practice for sure.
General Manager, Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority
That's where it's frustrating for us, for example. There is RFID going into the U.S., but nothing coming into Canada, so people who cross the border think they can use RFID to come into Canada but can't. There are some very simple harmonization things that could be done to make the border work better.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
That's what we want to hear about.
Thank you all very much.
Just for your information, we are having a bit of a round table between six and seven, if you want to come back, so that you have the chance to talk further with committee members. We're all going to be available between six and seven.
We'll suspend until the next panel.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
Thank you very much for being here, gentlemen.
We have Accipiter Radar Technologies Inc., with Tim Nohara, president and chief executive officer, and Niagara Industrial Association's Roy Timms, board member and former chair. We have, as an individual, Patrick Robson, a professor at Niagara College, and for the Welland/Pelham Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Milot, director.
Thank you all very much for being here. We appreciate that.
Mr. Milot, would you like to start?
Verne Milot Director, Welland/Pelham Chamber of Commerce
Thank you very much.
Madam Chair and standing committee, I'd like to thank the committee for hearing us today, as we speak on behalf of our chamber membership on the trade corridor and related transportation issues in Niagara.
I can say unequivocally that maintaining a vibrant and seamless trading hub through the peninsula corridor remains a top concern and priority for our 2,000 members. Many rely on this corridor for their trade livelihood, and it's of paramount importance that we face impending issues on this critical route. It is clear that the federal government can play a key role in many ways.
Of top concern is the continually congested QEW corridor from Hamilton to the U.S. bridge border crossings in Niagara Falls and Fort Erie. A true Canadian Niagara trade corridor strategy will have to deal with the congested Niagara international bridges by providing appropriate infrastructure and systemic border crossing improvements to reduce mounting delay times at the border.
Even more critically, a mid-peninsula highway is needed to address gridlock from the QEW and move commercial traffic and trade in a proven, viable connection, to connect Buffalo to Hamilton, Hamilton airport, and major centres in southwestern Ontario through to Windsor and Sarnia.
Years have been spent tweaking and perfecting environmentally sensitive, relatively inexpensive, and effective highway corridors. It's time to make the move. Following the appropriate environmental assessments that are now under way, we encourage the federal government to work with the province and other stakeholders to help make this link a reality as soon as possible and to ensure that our chronic corridor vehicle congestion along the QEW is lightened.
Indeed, much of our transportation now depends on seamless, fast links between different types of transportation. It is here that Niagara excels in potential, with inexpensive and appropriate lands that can be leveraged to smooth a way to sensible development and transportation links to rail, tidewater access, and other connections. This may include new rail links to development lands. We urge the federal government to use its mandates, leverage, and financial backing to help make this happen.
Welland Canal's shores have also been in development limbo—if you want to call it that—along dozens of kilometres of prime industrial and employment growth lands. This must change. It is here that Transport Canada can play a key role in sensitively opening up those areas and connecting them appropriately to trade transportation routes as part of a more robust industrial hub.
Rail, water, trucking, and related connections must be made more open, seamless, and functional for our future economic security and prosperity. Dormant, developable industrial lands along the Welland Canal are also no longer acceptable if we're to entrench the region in a foreign trade zone in a way that will be robust and credible for decades to come.
In these ways, Niagara's future as a trade corridor of national importance can be secured. Our chamber members can then do business in a future that will bolster their success and potentially add thousands of new jobs.
Thank you for your time.
Liberal
Patrick Robson Professor, Niagara College, As an Individual
Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for inviting me.
As mentioned, my name is Patrick Robson. I'm actually a registered professional planner and a member of the Canadian Institute of Planners, so while my present role is professor at Niagara College, I did serve as the commissioner of planning for the Niagara Region for a number of years, and it is through the eyes of an urban regional planner that I provide my comments today.
First off, let me give a little history. The notion of Niagara as a trade corridor is certainly nothing new. Indeed, it goes back to our first peoples. The area was the nexus of trade for first peoples, and there's evidence that under the supervision and oversight of the Neutrals, Niagara was a centre to conduct trade for hundreds of years. The Algonquian people from as far north as Hudson Bay, the Seminole peoples from Florida, and all nations in between converged on Niagara as a trade crossroads for the entire eastern portion of North America, so it does still have that critical locational value.
Half the battles of the War of 1812 were actually fought in the Niagara theatre, and the reason is quite simple: Because of the strategic location for the movement of goods and people, if you controlled the route, you controlled the continent. Regardless of who may or even can claim victory in that conflict, there's no doubt that it served as a seminal nation-building exercise for both sides of the border, and that's been followed by over 200 years of binational co-operation on many fronts, not the least of which is trade.
The building of the Welland Canal, which actually began in the 1820s, opened up the interior of the continent for trade, and that continues today. In fact, it's been said that if the eight Great Lakes states and Ontario and Quebec were one economy, they'd be the third- or fourth-largest in the world, so it is still a very critical location.
If we scroll forward to 1974, the importance of moving goods and people was recognized in the first Niagara regional policy plan. Specifically it envisioned a mid-peninsula corridor, which you've heard about. From a planning perspective, I would suggest that the inclusion of the mid-peninsula note was not so much a novel vision as it was a recognition that the bones of a trade corridor already existed—the general route of Highway 20 in terms of roads; rail infrastructure such as the still-operative Toronto, Hamilton & Buffalo, or TH&B, line; and the critical intersection that both have with the Welland Canal. However, during those times, the local economy was thriving with steel and automotive manufacturing, so the attention on moving forward with enhancing that corridor was not pursued with enthusiasm. It has been looked at again since the economic landscape of the area has changed significantly with the exodus of a lot of that industrial activity.
That brings us to the late 1990s and early 2000s. Local leaders, including our friends in western New York, were undergoing a similar economic transition and began looking in earnest at how to transition to a renewed economic future. Coincidentally, at the same time the Province of Ontario was considering how to accommodate future growth in the greater Golden Horseshoe. That includes Niagara and Hamilton. Local leaders successfully petitioned Queen's Park to recognize the trade nexus that is Niagara, and part of that success was based on being able to argue for the existence of significant transportation infrastructure—road, rail, marine, and air. When the first growth plan for the greater Golden Horseshoe was approved, there was what I call a Niagara special designation for what is known as the Niagara gateway economic zone and centre. However, what was going to happen there was still to be defined, which actually was a welcome opportunity locally.
I was most fortunate at that time to be the staff lead on the process, and we had political championship from several folks, most notably Mr. Vince Badawey, who was then Port Colborne's mayor and is now MP for Niagara Centre. They developed an entire policy regime with policy tools like financial incentives, and all of that was developed as part of the gateway plan. Underpinning that plan were some basic assumptions and objectives: the reality that we have over 2,000 hectares of developable or redevelopable industrial land that is being entirely underutilized, and the existence of that multimodal infrastructure. Focusing on what we do well in our economy—food processing in this area, advanced manufacturing, and logistics—was a big part of that. Also, it was understood that that gateway serves regional, provincial, and national economic interests. It was in fact the foundation for the granting of a foreign trade zone by the government.
The foundational pieces are all in place. We have federal recognition, provincial designation, and local policies and tools, but we need to effect the coordination and integration of those transportation assets. They intersect, but that doesn't mean they interact anywhere near their collective potential. That's part of the challenge.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
Thank you, Mr. Robson. Maybe you can get in your other comments when you're answering some questions.
Please go ahead, Mr. Nohara.
Dr. Tim Nohara President and Chief Executive Officer, Accipiter Radar Technologies Inc.
It's a pleasure seeing you again. Thank you for having me, Madam Chair and committee members.
Good afternoon. My name is Tim Nohara, and I'm the president and CEO of Accipiter Radar, a Canadian high-tech company located right here in Niagara at the centre of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway shipping system.
The shipping system is a critical, green, binational marine superhighway that reaches throughout the Ontario-Quebec continent gateway and trade corridor. About 70% of our trade with our southern partner is done through here.
To maintain and grow vital trade assets requires investment from Ottawa, such as the $4 billion investment in the Gordie Howe bridge, but our competitiveness, job growth, resilience to climate change and terrorism, safety, and environmental protection depend on more than bricks and mortar. They require investment in smarter trade, and smarter trade is both greener and safer because it maintains operational fluidity. With a small investment, Canada can position itself to become the global leader in smart shipping right here where intermodal shipping logistics are optimized in real time.
This investment would be in the form of shared maritime domain awareness technology that would be distributed among ports, the Great Lakes, and the seaway throughout Ontario and Quebec, and accessible by all transportation stakeholders to provide decision support and system-wide collaborative decision-making.
We've all experienced traffic congestion on highways and bridges. We speed in segments where traffic is light, only to hit the brakes and crawl or stop for minutes or hours where there is congestion. We understand that our travel time would be considerably shorter if traffic was spaced out more evenly and if we reduced our speed by maybe 10% or 20%. In addition, we would emit a lot less greenhouse gas and accidents would be fewer.
The same thing happens on the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway shipping system. A cargo ship or cruise ship may be transiting over 3,000 kilometres from Quebec City to Thunder Bay. En route, the vessel goes full steam, only to hit several slowdowns along the way, often caused by pleasure craft. This results in significant wastage of fuel, which is the number one cost for shipping. If the slowdowns could be predicted, ships would slow down during those segments, saving fuel and reducing greenhouse gases, but no one knows where the pleasure craft are.
Pleasure craft hugely outnumber ships on this marine superhighway, in the same way cars outnumber transport trucks on our paved highways. Pleasure craft are often responsible for these slowdowns as they unintentionally block shipping lanes and access to docks. If harbourmasters and vessel traffic managers knew where pleasure craft were causing obstructions, the authorities could be dispatched to disperse them in order to avoid the slowdowns.
Because there is considerable uncertainty around when a ship will arrive at its designated terminal or berth, the just-in-time arrival of logistics handlers who load and unload freight to and from ships to another transportation mode such as rail or truck is not possible today. If logistics personnel could better predict ship arrival times, they could coordinate intermodal transfers more efficiently. You see, smarter shipping requires a real-time shared understanding of what the traffic looks like, especially pleasure craft, so stakeholders can do their part to manage flow, individually as well as collaboratively, across the shipping system. Investment in shared maritime domain awareness technology is the way to fill this critical traffic awareness gap on the marine superhighway.
We are a pioneer and global leader in this technology, which combines radar information systems and big data analytics—AI—to provide decision support to stakeholders so they can be smarter about managing their shipping operations.
Accipiter is partnered with Canada's leading transportation logistics research institutes in Quebec and Ontario, with our shipping companies in all the major ports in Ontario and Quebec, with the Seaway, with the Council of the Great Lakes Region, and with others. This creates a shovel-ready technology project that could greatly leverage and enhance this Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway shipping system and the continental gateway, and propel Canada as a global leader in smarter shipping for the benefit of Canadians.
This project is also very well aligned with Minister Garneau's transportation 2030 plan, the oceans protection plan, and Minister McKenna's Great Lakes protection initiative.
I look forward to answering your questions.
Roy Timms Board Member, Former Chair, Niagara Industrial Association
Thank you.
Madam Chair, members of the standing committee, I'm Roy Timms, a past chairman of the Niagara Industrial Association, and I'm here today representing our 220 members, who manufacture about a billion dollars' worth of goods per year. Together the association has prepared this submission for your consideration, and we thank you for the opportunity.
We believe in Niagara's future as a critical Canadian trade hub and a vital contributor to our country's economic well-being. Niagara has significant untapped potential and far too much idle opportunity. Niagara is well positioned as a next-generation strategic transportation corridor. We are located between Canada and the United States and boasted $105 billion in trade value crossing our borders in 2015. Three-quarters of the St. Lawrence Seaway's $34.6 billion in economic activity passes through the Welland Canal, which runs through the centre of the peninsula.
Niagara is a day's truck drive in any direction to a growing 140-million-person marketplace in Canada and the United States. We've also been designated as Ontario's first foreign trade zone point. Niagara is a major hub and intermodal freight transport point. We have significant potential for growth. Our proximity to the U.S.-Canadian border is unique. We have inexpensive available land, tidewater shipping access, and a class A rail access connecting to American rail carriers. We also have a short rail line running the width of the peninsula. We have a well-maintained highway network plus a world-class affordable standard of living for new residents.
All told, this gives us a unique situational advantage with tremendous potential to become a hub that complements and reduces overburdened corridors such as the GTA. Ontario and the northeastern United States are forecast for continued growth. Niagara has the potential to accommodate significant increased transportation of Canadian raw materials and finished goods for decades to come. We are certain that creating this trade infrastructure in Niagara is an important piece for ensuring the development and sustainability of Canadian export trade.
We believe the Canadian trade corridor strategy should leverage all this opportunity and natural advantage by implementing enhancements to the road, rail, bridge, and waterway networks creating corridors more accessible to Niagara's industrial sector and employment lands.
Of primary importance, we have a pressing need for faster, more reliable U.S. border access across congested Niagara international bridges. We envision a connection from Buffalo to the Hamilton airport to the Brantford—Kitchener-Waterloo—London corridor utilizing a mid-peninsula highway. This would be a new highway that has been under consideration for quite a while.
Stakeholders agree this powerful link will unleash a strategic bottleneck that is vital to the future economic development of southwestern Ontario. The proposed mid-peninsula highway is undergoing environmental assessment. We urge the federal government to add its support and financial underpinning for the project.
In addition, the strategy would be connected to the development of industrial commercial parcels that have been vacant for far too long along the Welland Canal. As you know, a major transition is taking place with the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation. It's now involved in a federal review, studying possible opportunities for development.
Niagara is a clear candidate for that kind of change. Other ports along the seaway have grown and prospered, but the lands along the Welland Canal have remained stagnant for the life of the agreement.
This is not to cast blame on the seaway for the stagnation, because land development is not their core business, but it is time for a new focus, with energized lead players focusing on the underutilized federal asset, the employment lands along the Welland Canal.
A Niagara trade corridor strategy should also include a corresponding industrial investment strategy that creates jobs to rezone new lands—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
Mr. Timms, I'm sorry to interrupt, but the committee has questions, and we only have so much time.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
What you didn't get in, maybe you can get in when you respond to a question.
Go ahead, Mr. Jeneroux.
Edmonton Riverbend, CPC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you all for being here today.
We heard from Algoma Central Corporation that keeping the Welland Canal open longer would significantly impact in a positive way the economic benefit of the region. Is that sentiment shared by those of you at the table?
I'll start with you, Mr. Timms.
Professor, Niagara College, As an Individual
I would say to not only keep it open longer but also recognize it as not simply a 26-mile-long pathway but also as a harbour and port for which there are other potential docking facilities and intermodal transportation activity. I think not only will the tonnage go up significantly, but the usage will reflect all of that.
Director, Welland/Pelham Chamber of Commerce
We have an example with Jungbunzlauer in Port Colborne, where they even use freighters in the wintertime as a method of grain storage when it can't be transported. They store grain on them and use them throughout the winter.
Albeit as a result of an environmental catastrophe, we're still getting warmer winters, and it becomes easier, but with that period shortened, the freighters can still be used for other purposes.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Accipiter Radar Technologies Inc.
I think I can comment on that now. With regard to the ice conditions, this past season we saw a Fednav vessel stuck in snow lock and the seaway forced to remain open for an extra week. Better ice monitoring, which the shared MDA technology I spoke of can deliver, cannot only help keep it open longer but help shipping companies. That's why they're co-operating with us: to know the nature of the ice and its flows through the choke points in the rivers so they can get in another one or two runs a year.
Edmonton Riverbend, CPC
Right. The seaway has commented that keeping it open longer wouldn't have made any impact anyway in seven of the 10 past years. Comments about that would be helpful.
Professor, Niagara College, As an Individual
The way I'm challenged to look at that is that they will read it based on past trends as opposed to how can they mine the asset and make it more productive.
I believe if there's investment being made in the utility of the asset for more multimodal transshipment activity, including pre-border logistics, I don't think those past trends are going to be an indication of future performance.
Edmonton Riverbend, CPC
That's interesting.
Shifting gears a little bit, you guys spoke of it and we experienced it yesterday coming from the airport here. Previous witnesses have spoken about the obvious need or desire for increased road travel, for highways. I've lost track, but I think there were at least one, two, or three possible requests for additional roadways.
Do you guys feed into municipal requests for priorities, which then feed into the province, and then feed into the federal government?
I'm from Alberta, and that's the typical method we seem to follow, but it would seem odd to have requests here saying you need this roadway, and then the federal government would jump in and say, “Great, a roadway. Now get on board, province and municipality.” It seems to work the other way up.
Is there a problem with the ways these are being ranked? Is there a preference that the ranking be different than what it is? I think it would be helpful to hear some enlightening facts on how it works in the region here.
Professor, Niagara College, As an Individual
I can try that.
I think your read is that you will get pressure, lobbying, or influencing coming from the local level depending on the degree to which that particular locality sees the pressing need. In a place like Niagara where the economy's been in transition, it's a stronger urgency. Now you have to layer that on to whether that's what your neighbouring municipalities want to accomplish. At the same time, how does it fit in potentially with a larger strategy?
Having been involved in the environmental assessment process for the mid-peninsula transportation corridor, I think that one of the things that needs to be wrestled to the ground very quickly is delineating the movement of people and the movement of goods, because if we do that, then I think our options become clearer: while it's a road, maybe it's a road and rail after an emphasis on ways that help to make that separation better and more effective.