The federal emergency legislation designed to help clear the grain transportation backlog that is expected to be tabled today by the Conservative government is coming with high expectations and numerous demands.

Ralph Goodale, Liberal MP for Wascana, said they are glad the federal government is introducing emergency legislation to help deal with the crisis, but there has to be measures in it to make certain this doesn’t happen again. He said there are four key things that are required in the legislation starting with creating a completely independent agency tasked with monitoring the grain system, measuring the performance of what is happening and reporting on it publicly.

“The system has changed radically over the course of the last three years, biggest change in probably three generations, and there is no overall measuring system to report to farmers and others about the consequences of all this change,” said Goodale. “First of all you can’t manage what you don’t measure, so there’s got to be an independent system that is not controlled by the railways, not controlled by grain companies and not controlled by the government that will collect all the data and publish all the data so that everybody can be fully informed of what actually is going on.”

Goodale said the second measure needed is a procedure called a railway costing review, which was last done in 1992 and is a process where all the revenues and costs related to grain transportation are measured and calculated so it would be known exactly what it physically costs to move a bushel of grain and how that money is shared throughout the system. He said the railways have always said whenever they can be more efficient in moving grain they will share those efficiency gains with others in the system such as farmers, grain companies and truckers, but those words are being taken with a bit of salt now.

“There has been a lot of railway abandonment since (1992), a lot of closure of delivery points since then, different technology in hopper cars since then, the operation of the ports have changed, the grain commission has changed (and) the wheat board is gone,” he said. “It’s time to do another fully comprehensive railway costing review to examine what it costs to move a bushel of grain, what the revenue is available to the railways to move that bushel of grain and how efficiency gains in the system are being shared with all the players or as everybody expects are all those efficiency gains being horded by the railways and not shared with anybody.”

Lyle Stewart, agricultural minister for the Government of Saskatchewan, shares Goodale’s view for a third proposed measure that mandatory service level agreements with reciprocal penalties for non-compliance be implemented. Stewart said the reciprocal penalties on both grain companies and railways for failing to live up to their agreements would be in addition to the $100,000 a day fines imposed on railways in a March 7 federal government Order in Council for failing to meet targets of delivering one million tonnes of grain a week on a sustained basis by mid-April.

To read more please see the March 24 print edition of The Davidson Leader.