Mr. Speaker, I will try not to wave my arms too much, because it seems the parliamentary secretary believes that my arm waving annoys you, and I would never try to annoy the Speaker. Being a Scotsman, we are somewhat inclined to move our arms. At least we are moving our arms in the sense of having conviction and passion about doing something immediately and are not flapping our arms in the air trying to fly like a gull, when clearly we are not.
Ultimately, this really is about an emergency now, not in three or five years. There is no question that additional data will be a good thing and the round table will eventually be helpful. However, the round table that will come out with recommendations six months from now, in the initial report, and then in additional reports over the next five years, will not move one more bushel of grain off the Prairies in the foreseeable future.
Yes, there is a recommendation not only from the minister but from Farm Credit Canada that farmers should apply for advance payments. That certainly is a program to protect farmers, but in some cases, these farmers are going to actually have advance payments and will still have crops in their bins in April when they are getting ready to seed the next new crop. They will actually have to repay it by September and may not have the funds to do that.
Would the minister's position then be forgiveness for some of those things if they do not happen? Clearly if they are backstopping that, and they still run into difficulties, it is going to be farmers who take on additional debt for what was not their problem. They did not cause this logistics problem such that they cannot get grain out of their farms to ports and to their customers.
In fact, a couple of my colleagues down the way were at that committee hearing, the members for Malpeque and Wascana. I remember it all too well. It was the minister who said that they just needed to get with the times and forward-contract.
I got an email from a farmer who forward-contracted in November. He said that he had not moved a bushel yet, and it is now February. When he forward-contracted, he had a price of $7. He is now looking at a base price of $4. No one is telling him who is making up the $3. He asked if the elevator company would be making it up and was told, “We don't know. We don't know what we'll be able to sell it for. We don't care what the contract was”.
There was another account of a farmer who had 85,000 tons of malt. Lo and behold, it never moved. Not one bushel moved. The buyout ended up being $1 a ton. They bought out his contract instead of honouring it. Instead of being able to sell it for $4.50, he ended up getting $1.
At the end of the day, it is farmers who are suffering, and clearly we need to do this.
For my friend across the way, the parliamentary secretary, a tentative agreement means exactly that. It means that both sides have said that they actually think they have a good deal. They will take it back to their membership. On the union side, the teamsters will. They will put it before their membership and ask them to ratify it. I would suggest that folks on the other side have a little faith in the process rather than jumping the gun. A tentative agreement has been reached, and 99% of the time the tentative agreements are actually ratified, because the members who have bargained on behalf of the workers are empowered by those workers to go and do that job for them, usually with marching orders as to what they need to bargain for.
It seems to me, according to the parliamentary secretary in his announcement, that there was a tentative agreement. That is a good-news story. We should accept it as a good-news story and not look to continue to swing at workers when there is not necessarily something to swing at.
What we need to do is look at some of the things that have happened in the last year, specifically at CP. There was an article in The Globe and Mail business section last week featuring the new CEO of CP. “Harrison's Revolution” was the title of the chart it had. What was it? It was the 90,000 carloads of crude oil CP moved in 2013, which was a 68% increase over 2012. That was a good-news story for CP, not for grain, mind you, but it was a good-news story for CP.
Four thousand five hundred and fifty jobs were eliminated. That is not a good-news story for those workers, their families, and their communities and not good for farmers, because these were folks who actually drove locomotives.
Eleven thousand rail cars were removed from service. Were they decrepit? Were they broken down or no longer functioning? No, they were just taken out of service.
Then what happened? Four hundred locomotives were taken out.
My colleague from Wascana talked about the need to put more locomotive power on the track. What did CP do? It took it out, removed it.
Everybody knew we were headed for a bumper crop. At the time that we were headed for a bumper crop, the railway took capacity out, to maximize its profit. What did it get? It got a better operating ratio, it had more profit, and its shares went up. Well done, CP. It made a business decision based upon itself, not the overall system.
We know we need to get grain off the Prairies. The primary mode of transportation is rail. We have two railways in this country, CN and CP; and we have short lines that do great work, but primarily we are looking at two. We have, basically, a duopoly in this country.
I take my friends from the Liberal Party back to 2001, when they were the government. There was actually a review done on rail, at the time—the esteemed Justice Estey was actually part of that—as to whether we should have open access. That was part of it. Senator Banks was also part of that review. The recommendation of Justice Estey was that he thought open access should be part of the changes, making more competition on the rail between CN and CP, allowing other players in. Short-line railways, at the time, were very keen on it. Short-line railways, today, are still very keen on it, by the way. That would help with this emergency access, by the way, at the moment. Short-liners are willing to step up to help if CN and CP cannot.
The review panel, with Justice Willard Estey, supported it. Senator Banks supported it. It was supported by the Canadian Wheat Board. It was supported by the grain commission and growers. It was support by a number of other folks. The three major players that said they did not want it were CN, CP, and Transport Canada.
We cannot talk about CN and CP, in the sense that they are private businesses. I guess they make those kinds of decision.
However, Transport Canada is ours. It belongs to the government. We deal with that. We have a Minister of Transport. We have authority there.
In the irony of ironies, in fact, it was actually hypocritical. At the time, CN and CP said they did not want open access to their lines in Canada; they were lobbying the U.S. government to have open access into the United States on its rail lines. Therefore, while they thought it was good for them and the U.S., they did not want to do it in Canada. They wanted to close off that loop, just to protect themselves, and got access into the United States.
The irony of all that is at the time this review was done, 12 years ago, we actually may have had more competition than we have now. There is no guarantee of that, none. We do not know if indeed those competitors were committed; perhaps they would have been taken over or perhaps they would have gone out of business. We are not necessarily certain.
However, what it points to is that, indeed, open access is an alternative to be looked at.
The government is asking for ideas from this side of the House. I am happy it is asking. That would be one idea we suggest looking at. It is not simple to do. Running a railway is not an easy business. Allowing other access on one's rail line requires logistical support and planning. For sure it does; so it has to be well thought out. However, it ought to be thought about, at this moment, at this juncture in time. We could do it for a short period of time to see how it works out. Maybe it is a longer term strategy. Maybe that would come out of the round table.
However, I have to be honest. I have this vision of a round table. I remember the railway set I got when I was a child, many years ago, growing up in Glasgow, Scotland. It went round and round and never went anywhere.
I have this vision that nothing will happen with this round table and train that goes round and round. The grain will just not move. It will not do what all of us want it to do. I do not think that anyone in the House would say we should not bother with it. The problem is that there are solutions that need to be explored, and we cannot worry about it in five years or two years. We all know there are farmers who are hurting now. We have all received emails from across the country and the Prairies from farmers who are saying they are broke because they have not moved anything. They do not get paid if they do not move it, and they cannot move it.
I talked to a gentleman just the other night from the Port of Vancouver. He said straight out that his bins in the port are half empty and that he was shuttling ships up and down the berth. He said he fills one third here and moves that one up, like parking cars. Then he moves another ship in and fills it a third and then moves it back and brings the other one back. He said he now has ships at anchor off Vancouver Island because there is no longer room to put them in Burrard Inlet. Clearly, the backlog is not at the port. Rather, it is inland, as we head. One of the ways to solve it is to look at open access. I think the government should look at that.
Looking back in time, I found that the two railways got together in 2000 for what was called the Fraser Canyon deal. They both run west up one line through the Fraser Canyon. For those who may not know, the Fraser Canyon is a bit of a bottleneck for the railways. It is part of the geography of the country we live in. What amazes me, and I have always wondered about this, is when companies say it is snowing. Yes, it is. It is winter. It is Canada and it snows in the mountains. One would think that a major railroader would think about those issues. We understand it slows things down, but the Fraser Canyon piece was done because the two railways got together and said it would be more efficient for them to do it that way: going west, they go up one side where the grade is lower, and they go back on the other side where the grade is higher, because for the most part they are coming back empty, especially the hopper cars. In doing that they created efficiencies for themselves and did not pass any of the money back. That is not unusual. If it was good enough for them to do that in 2000 and they were more efficient, at this moment in time when we need them to be more efficient and need more capacity on the Prairies to move grain, it is another idea for the government to pursue with the railways, because talking clearly has not had any major effect on them.
I know there are a lot of numbers being thrown around. Let me provide some other numbers, because we know they are being bandied about tonight. This is what CN booked for the full year last year. For 2012, it booked 597,000 potash and grain cars. In 2013, it booked and handled 572,000. It is down, not up. At this moment in time when there was a bumper record crop on the Prairies, CN's carloads were down, not up. I cannot suggest that it took cars out of service, because it did not do that, unlike CP, which took its capacity away to increase its share of profits. CN just did not deliver the cars. My colleagues have talked numerous times about a large number of orders for cars. Even the minister said that he wants to know why, if an elevator orders 150 cars, it gets 100. Why does he not know? This has been going on for months. I would have expected the minister to be out there saying, “I no longer want to ask the question. You are going to answer it and answer it now. I do not want to hear any chin-wagging stuff about it being winter. I want to know where this stuff is coming from, because clearly it is not happening. We have all heard it.”
We, as legislators, as the policy makers, have the stick when it comes to the railways, because clearly the elevator companies do not. The grain farmers certainly do not. The profits were up for both railways last year and they are singing a merry tune to their shareholders, so why would they do something different? Is it in their best interests to do something different?
I would suggest that they probably would not. They have a record year in their profit bottom line, the share price is up, and the bonus is good. Why would they want to put excess capacity on the line that they might use for a couple of months but have to carry the overhead for six months or a year? Their bottom line would shrink. Why would they do that?
They are not service providers from the goodness of their hearts. They are service providers to make money, and we should accept that. Most of all, the government should know that, as it set it up that way.
If we want the railways to provide a true service to farmers who are in an emergency situation and need to move the grain off the Prairies, then it is going to take more than sitting down with them and asking for a favour.
I would suggest that the minister sit down with the railroaders and dangle a carrot, and when they refuse it, hit them with a great big stick. Tell them that they are going to do it or we are going to start talking about the fact that what they own is from the wheels up, but we own the track. That is the way we are going to make them move.
At the end of the day, if we own the track as the Canadian government, the railroaders will move. Then we can make decisions about open access and short-line railroads helping out, because they can and they have the initiative to do that.
We can bandy about the politics of the Wheat Board, and a lot of us would like to go back to that. One thing is clear: the logistics end of the Wheat Board worked. Now, it might not have worked as well as everyone would have liked, but we threw it all out and had nothing to replace it with.
Now we have a five-year study. Mr. Bacon says that we need to put back in place something to get the crop from the farm, to the elevator, to the railway, to the port, to the terminal, and into our market. If we do not do that, he says we will tarnish our image, which is already starting to tarnish.
When we become an irregular supplier, when our customers see us as unable to get product to them, what will they do? I will bet Australia, the Americans, and Brazil will be knocking on their door saying that Canadians cannot deliver but they can.
There is an emergency debate for a reason: it is indeed an emergency. It means action, not words. I would enact it now, but I am not the government, and those are the rules of the House.
Therefore, I look to the government. Where is the action plan? Heaven knows it has enough billboards hanging about with wonderful colours. It has a lovely green on it, and I spotted orange on it once. Maybe somebody put a dash of colour in it. Show us some action on this. It is time for action from the Conservative government.
The minister and, quite frankly, the Prime Minister need to simply say that we have to actually act and that we are going to move forward on this. Farmers depend upon it, and it is not just farmers.
I will end with this.
There are a number of things happening across the broader economy. There is a mill in B.C. that has shut down because it cannot move product either. There are millers saying that they do not have product, and so they will probably have to go idle for a while. A canola plant in the western provinces last week went idle for a couple of days and it could not get rid of its crush. Where was the crush going? It was going to farmers who had cattle to feed. However, none of that happened, none of that moved, because as this bottleneck gets bigger, the backup impacts more than just the farmers. However, clearly, they are the ones with the most need at this moment in time because, unlike others, they do not get paid if they cannot deliver.
As I said at the beginning, these farmers have contracted to sell their grain months ago, but they still have it, through no fault of their own. They took the government's advice on the CWB and when it left they said they would forward market, do all the great things the government said, and at least they would have market freedom. The problem is that they are free to keep all their grain in their bins, which is free to them because they cannot get a nickel for it if they cannot move it.
Clearly, the obligation is on the government to show initiative, to make a decision, and to act.
