Good morning. Thanks. My name is Robert Ashton, national president for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada. My pronouns are he and him.
The current year to date volumes comparing December 2022 and December 2021 show that fully loaded, imports are down 3.9% and exports are down 20% here in B.C., on the west coast. Empty containers for import are down 36.8%. The total number of exported cans that are empties according to the VFPA is 545,000 approximately, and fulls are 402,000 approximately. That means 58% of containers leaving through the port of Vancouver are empties.
In Prince Rupert, it's worse. There were 74,000 full and 196,642 empties, for a whopping 73% empty container export. This country does not have an issue with getting Canadian goods to other countries; we just need to do a better job at getting empty containers filled before they leave Canada. Our capacity is 6.3 million TEUs for 2022, and we've used 4,612,130 [Technical difficulty—Editor]