Transport Committee on April 13th, 2026

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Sydney—Glace Bay, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My questions will be for Mr. Harvey and Mr. Hynes.

So far in this study we've talked to a decent number of ports on the Atlantic coast, and they have talked about the importance of rail in terms of being more competitive. In addition, I've talked to ports on the east coast. They haven't come here, but they have said the same thing. I'm wondering, from an Atlantic Canada standpoint, about the state of rail, we'll call it, in terms of readiness.

Mr. Harvey, you talked about not waiting to build infrastructure. We need to build it now. I'm wondering if I can get a sense from both of you of the priorities when it comes to rail, where we are in the current rail structure and what needs to be done to ensure Atlantic Canadian ports are indeed competitive.

[Eric Harvey]

As to the rail service to Atlantic Canada—the west coast to the east coast—there's certainly capacity available there. You have the two national railways, with one serving various ports, including the port of Halifax, and another one serving the port of Saint John in New Brunswick. We understand that these two ports in particular are not at capacity now and that therefore, if there is any opportunity for growth, both railways would be present and would answer to that demand.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Sydney—Glace Bay, NS]

In terms of rail as it exists now, how would you grade the state of affairs of rail in Atlantic Canada? Would you grade it as an A, meaning nothing needs to change, or is it a B, C, D, E or F?

[Eric Harvey]

Look, I'm not sure I want to provide an assessment—

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Sydney—Glace Bay, NS]

You don't have to provide a grade, but can I get an assessment from your perspective?

[Eric Harvey]

The sense I have is that, first of all, the rail corridors are in place, and the infrastructure that exists seems to be answering to the demand.

The question links a bit to what I was saying earlier—that if indeed there is a significant increase in demand, everything is there and available. It would be just an incremental improvement to what you already have in order to meet that demand. This is how I would see that picture. It's that the railways would be present and ready to support traffic to the east coast.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Sydney—Glace Bay, NS]

Thank you for that.

I want to touch on some things with respect to your recommendations. I found them very interesting.

I come from Cape Breton Island and I come from a union family. Most of what I have today wouldn't have been possible without a strong union and a strong business sector, where my dad worked for many years as a coal miner. It's provided me with a lot. At the same time, your testimony with respect to the challenges of the supply chain was that labour stability in particular hasn't been there, clearly.

You talked about the business opportunities that we lost with existing companies that utilize rail. I don't know if it's quantifiable or not, but in terms of potential business, I want to start there.

You've talked very eloquently, both of you, about opportunities lost. In terms of businesses that may have been thinking of coming to Canada or thinking about laying a flag somewhere on the east coast, in central Canada or on the north coast, can you give us a sense—if it's not quantifiable, then anecdotally—of how much that has impacted our ability to attract businesses that you probably wouldn't see in any kind of data sheet?

[Derrick Hynes]

I don't think it's quantifiable today. What I will say is that when I talk to our members, they tell me that when they talk to their counterparts internationally, Canada's recent record around labour instability is becoming more well known, and it doesn't make us look good. I think we have an absolutely golden opportunity in a very difficult time to position Canada as a place to do business, as a place to import and export, but we need better labour stability.

We do not need to undermine unions, so I'm with you 100% on that. We need mature, respectful, reasonable collective bargaining in which trade-offs are made and deals are struck. We have to end this pattern of really consequential work stoppages, and the only way to do that, we think, is to make some tweaks to the system and do all we can to keep parties at the bargaining table.

If all else fails and we reach a situation in the critical supply chain industries where bargaining seems beyond fixing in a particular round of bargaining, we need to bring in some form of alternative dispute resolution to get us to a deal.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Kelloway.

Mr. Hynes, Mr. Harvey and Mr. Sharma, I want to thank you. Unfortunately, we are out of time. We do have another panel.

Mr. Harvey, if you have additional thoughts, I invite you to share your written thoughts with our clerk, and we'll add them to the testimony.

With that, I want to thank all three of you for contributing to this very important study.

Colleagues, we're going to suspend for a couple of minutes to allow the clerk to set up for the next round of witnesses.

The meeting is suspended to the call of the chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

I call this meeting back to order.

Colleagues, I'd like to welcome our witnesses for the second panel today. Appearing before us is Mr. John Grech, director of commercial development at Picton Terminals, and Lorna Campbell from the Port of Sydney Development Corporation.

Welcome to you both. We'll jump right into your opening remarks.

For that, Mr. Grech, the floor is yours. You have five minutes, sir.

[John Grech, Director, Commercial Development, Picton Terminals]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee. We greatly appreciate the opportunity to participate in your study.

I'm here today representing Picton Terminals, a privately owned deepwater facility located at the east end of Lake Ontario. Originally established in the 1950s as a marine loading facility for iron ore pellets, the site operated through the late 1970s. In 2014, the property was purchased by Doornekamp Construction with a vision that it could once again play a meaningful role in Canada's supply chain.

Since acquiring the facility, Picton Terminals has invested over $50 million to modernize the port and ensure that environmental and regulatory requirements are met. We have successfully built customized logistics solutions for such partners as Kimco Steel, Parrish & Heimbecker and Windsor Salt. The once dormant port is forecast to handle over 500,000 metric tons in 2026.

In today's economic environment, one marked by supply chain fragility, shifting trade relationships and increasing demand for resilience, the importance of strengthening Canada's transportation network has never been clearer. Marine transportation remains a critical and underutilized component of that network.

The St. Lawrence Seaway is operating below its potential capacity. This underutilization places growing pressure on rail and truck networks, contributing to driver shortages and congestion across major corridors. These are systemic indicators of an overreliance on land-based transportation.

Marine transportation is the natural relief valve. Expanding marine corridors improves overall logistics efficiency, reduces costs and emissions, extends the lifespan of our highway infrastructure and improves safety by easing congestion. However, while we have focused significant attention on expanding truck and rail infrastructure, we have not applied the same system-level thinking to our marine network. Container flows, for example, remain concentrated through a limited number of major gateway ports. These ports are essential, but they are also facing growing pressure. As congestion increases, system efficiency declines and the entire national supply chain becomes more vulnerable.

Canada has been highly effective at moving bulk commodities through the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence system, yet we continue to lag in containerized marine transport. This is not due to geography. It is due to network design.

Canada operates with a limited number of container entry points that do not reflect the distribution of population and economic activity. We are already seeing cargo destined for Canada increasingly routed through U.S. ports and inland corridors. If this trend continues, Canada risks growing dependence on foreign gateways for its own trade flows.

While investments in existing infrastructure, including expansion initiatives such as the one at Contrecoeur, are important, expanding only existing nodes is not enough to build a resilient national system. A stronger approach is to expand the network itself. Within the Great Lakes basin, home to approximately nine million Canadians, there are strategically located facilities that can complement existing gateways, including Thunder Bay, Goderich, Windsor and Picton.

Picton Terminals is uniquely positioned between Montreal and Hamilton, with direct access to Lake Ontario and proximity to the eastern GTA. This location supports short-sea shipping container movement that can remove millions of truck kilometres from Highway 401 annually, easing congestion and improving supply chain efficiency.

This is not theoretical. Picton Terminals and Parrish & Heimbecker have recently completed a major expansion project, investing approximately $50 million in private capital to expand marine handling capacity. As a result, we are enabling the movement of approximately 1.2 million tonnes of agricultural products—wheat, grains and beans—to global markets more efficiently. Trucks travel shorter distances, road and port congestion is reduced and supply chain costs are lower. This demonstrates what is possible when Canada treats its marine system as a network rather than a set of isolated gateways.

In closing, Picton Terminals is asking not to replace existing ports but to complement them. We are asking Canada to fully utilize the capacity of its Great Lakes-St. Lawrence marine system.

We are requesting two specific recommendations. The first is targeted federal investment to expand marine infrastructure capacity at underutilized facilities such as Picton and for them to be treated equally to the CPAs. The second is timely designation and support from the Canada Border Services Agency to enable container processing.

Canada has an opportunity to build a more balanced, resilient and efficient port system that reflects where Canadians live, where goods move and where future growth will occur. Picton Terminals is ready to play its part.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I welcome your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Grech.

We'll now turn the floor over to Ms. Campbell.

The floor is yours for five minutes.

[Lorna Campbell, Chief Executive Officer, Port of Sydney Development Corporation]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to appear today.

My name is Lorna Campbell. I'm a professional engineer and the CEO of the Port of Sydney Development Corporation.

The Port of Sydney Development Corporation is a self-funded not-for-profit organization that was originally established in 2002. We have a community-based board of directors, including representation from the Membertou and Eskasoni first nations and the Cape Breton Regional Municipality. I'm here to speak to what is practically needed to support, diversify and modernize Canada's ports, based on our direct experience.

Sydney Harbour is a year-round deepwater, sheltered port located on the northeastern shores of Cape Breton Island. We are strategically located approximately six miles off the North Atlantic great circle route. Sydney commands the Cabot Strait and is truly the gateway to the north.

Sydney is a federally owned public port. The submerged lands remain under federal ownership, while the port assets have been either transferred or sold. There is no official single local authority responsible for harbour-wide operations and coordination. Revenues generated by port activity are not consistently reinvested into the harbour. Critical infrastructure gaps persist, which limit our ability to grow and compete.

The port board has prioritized the resolution of the decades-old governance issues in Sydney. The Cape Breton Regional Municipality council unanimously supports the establishment of a local harbour authority, with the port corporation recognized as the unifying local proponent to advance governance modernization with Transport Canada. That level of alignment reflects both the urgency of the challenge and the opportunities facing us. Without effective port governance, opportunities are missed, and we risk trade and investment being diverted elsewhere. Viewed from a high level, modernizing Canada's ports is not just about infrastructure, but about governance, connectivity and the ability to reinvest and compete globally.

If ports are the gateway, rail is what connects Canada to global markets. We consistently see that ports with integrated rail connections are able to move goods more efficiently, attract larger-scale investments and access broader domestic and international markets. Without rail, even well-positioned ports struggle to compete, regardless of their geographic advantages, which are self-evident in Sydney Harbour.

In Sydney, we are advancing a practical governance model that reflects what's needed nationally. We are proposing the establishment of a local harbour authority for the port of Sydney through a management agreement with Transport Canada. Under this model, federal ownership and jurisdiction remain unchanged. However, a locally governed authority would be responsible for coordinating operations, improving efficiency and reinvesting revenues generated by harbour activity.

Importantly, this model fills an existing governance gap and forms the catalyst needed to advance strategic port planning and investments. It is a catalyst to access new global markets more directly, to support emerging industries such as offshore wind and critical minerals, to bolster defence capabilities and to strengthen Canada's overall supply chain resilience.

Without governance reform, infrastructure investments lack coordination and long-term sustainability. Without connectivity, governance reform cannot translate into economic growth. The two must work together.

From a federal perspective, there are three practical actions that can help unlock this opportunity. We recommend the following. First, enable and support management agreement models that allow for locally governed harbour authorities. Second, provide barrier-free transitional funding to fast-track strategic port investments and the establishment of sustainable local operations, bridging the gap between current constraints and long-term self-sufficiency. Third, recognize rail and intermodal connectivity as core components of port modernization.

In closing, Sydney Harbour is not a theoretical opportunity. It's a locally supported, ready-to-implement example of how Canada can modernize port governance, strengthen supply chains and advance trade diversification today. With the right tools, this model can be replicated in other regions across the country.

Thank you. I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much for your opening remarks, Ms. Campbell.

We'll begin our lines of questioning in the second round with Mr. Lawrence.

Mr. Lawrence, the floor is yours. You have five minutes, sir.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Clarke, ON]

Thank you very much.

My questions will be for you, Mr. Grech. I have been to the Picton port, and it is truly amazing what the private dollars, the entrepreneurship and the owners have done there. I'll give a big thank you to you from some of my local farmers in Northumberland. They appreciate it.

I want to give people a bit of an understanding of the service that Picton currently provides and could provide going forward. For folks who aren't from Ontario, the ships come in from the St. Lawrence Seaway right now, and Picton is on the north shore of Lake Ontario. They literally go right by Picton, Northumberland and Cobourg—many communities—and go to either Toronto or Hamilton, or even further, at which point they are off-loaded and then trucked all the way back to our eastern Ontario communities.

Is that correct? Am I correct in believing that tremendous efficiencies could be gained by off-loading more items at Picton and other local ports?

[John Grech]

You're absolutely correct. As I said earlier, it's about creating another node within the network.

As our population stretches, bus routes change and our commuters change. We go to where the commuters are. With the Picton terminal being situated where it is, absolutely there are a lot of goods that are going past and then coming all the way back.

It's not only that, but even ships are going past Picton. It was funny, actually, that when Parrish & Heimbecker came to our site to look at the site to determine whether or not they wanted to build their grain facility, there was a ship off-loading steel. The person from P&H looked at his phone and said, “You know, that ship is going to Hamilton to load grain. If we had those silos up, that ship would have off-loaded the steel, stayed right there at that facility, reloaded the grain and been on its way to international markets. We could have avoided that ship sailing all the way to Hamilton and all the way back.”

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Clarke, ON]

Thank you for that.

One ask that you outline—and it's been out there, I think, for a couple of years or more—is to enable your port to receive containers. In order to receive containers, you need CBSA support and, specifically, inspection. I believe you've even made offers to financially support this, but CBSA has rebuffed your request, despite the obvious benefits it could have for the surrounding communities in the Bay of Quinte, in my area, in Belleville and in other surrounding communities in eastern Ontario. Is that correct?

[John Grech]

That is correct.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Clarke, ON]

What type of support would be required, specifically? We have members of the government right there, and I'm sure they would love to tell Minister MacKinnon that this is a very easy thing to do to increase trade diversification, which supposedly they support.

[John Grech]

Absolutely. All we require is CBSA agents' presence at the facility. We, along with the port of Windsor, the port of Goderich and the port of Johnstown, have asked for the same. They have insisted that they do not have the manpower to do that.

We, at one point, did offer to cover the cost of that manpower. We would pay for the agents to come in and out of our facility to help facilitate these containers. At one point, we had a ship that was destined for Picton, and it was rebuffed three days before the ship was due to arrive, just because CBSA agents, unfortunately, could not be there.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Clarke, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Grech. I appreciate it. I truly hope, in a non-partisan way, that the Liberal members over there have heard this, because this is an easy, cost-efficient win that could help eastern Ontario tremendously, including the member for Bay of Quinte.

I'm going to move on from there to a notice of motion. I want Liberal members to listen to it fairly carefully, because we've done it in a very pointed way, in a way that's limited. I think it's easy, and I'm hopeful that when we eventually move the motion, we'll get unanimous support, because we've done it in a very limited way.

Here is the motion:

That, given that on March 25, 2026, the CEO of the Canada Infrastructure Bank stated that “if the committee wants an answer, I can aim to provide one”, and further stated that he is “always at the will of the committee” with respect to providing information on the repayment terms of the Canada Infrastructure Bank loan to the Mersey River Wind project,

a) the committee order the Canada Infrastructure Bank to provide the committee with the unredacted repayment terms of the loan to the Mersey River Wind project within 72 hours of the adoption of this motion, and

b) the committee instruct the chair to summons the CEO of the CIB to appear before the committee within five parliamentary sitting days following the 72-hour deadline, should the CIB fail to produce the full, unredacted repayment terms.

We're not asking for a million documents here. We're making a very specific request. There is almost no commercial reason that they shouldn't release this. It's a highly regulated industry, and all of this should be publicly provided.

As I said, we've done this in a very precise way, and I'm hoping we get unanimous support for those repayment terms, if for no other reason than to clear the air.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Lawrence. It's greatly appreciated. The time is almost perfect. Well done, sir.

We'll now turn the floor over to Mr. Kelloway.

The floor is yours. You have six minutes, please.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Sydney—Glace Bay, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My questions will be for Ms. Campbell.

First and foremost, I want to thank you, your board and your staff, past and present, for the work you're doing on the port file, as well as Mayor Clarke and council, Eskasoni and Membertou.

For those who don't know, the port of Sydney is known for its cruise traffic, but I know that your motivations and your goals go beyond that. I'm wondering if you'll walk the committee through where the port of Sydney stands with respect to significant near-term and long-term opportunities in relation to the trade diversification front.

[Lorna Campbell]

Sydney is very well known for our cruise industry. Cape Breton Island is a beautiful island, and we work very well with the Atlantic Canada ports, our partner ports. We are the home of the iconic big fiddle that maybe some people know about.

Cruise generates approximately $70 million in direct and indirect economic benefits island-wise, but cruise is not the only activity in Sydney Harbour. Sydney Harbour is home to Marine Atlantic, which is the constitutionally mandated service that connects Newfoundland and Labrador to Canada for year-round service. The port receives coal for Nova Scotia Power's power plant for energy generation, and we receive petroleum products at our terminal. There's a lot of existing activity around the harbour.

The key thing is a recent federal announcement by the Canadian Coast Guard that the port of Sydney would be the preferred location for the development of the maintenance base for the polar class icebreakers. That is a significant announcement for Sydney Harbour. It would be co-located adjacent to the Canadian Coast Guard Academy.

Sydney has ample land for development. We see further development with respect to northern supply and support, defence, and marine services, and we have seen significant activity with respect to supporting offshore wind activities for projects along the northeastern seaboard of the U.S.

That is what we are seeing for Sydney as imminent opportunities. What we need is to modernize our governance to provide the foundation to support all of these potential developments and current operators.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Sydney—Glace Bay, NS]

Let's talk about the governance model, because you touched upon it just now and in your testimony. With respect to a local harbour authority, that's what you're looking to become.

What are the benefits of a local harbour authority compared to the structure you have now? Could you walk through the benefits of the local harbour authority compared to what you have now with respect to the goals of the port of Sydney?