Port of Vancouver
Soybean handlers relieved as Vancouver port strike ends
Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
BLENHEIM — The two-week port strike in Vancouver interrupted the shipping of food-grade Ontario soybeans set for export around the world in shipping containers.
The strike ended with the International Labour & Warehouse Union ratifying a new contract Aug. 4.
The strike’s impact was felt by Ontario elevator operators and farmers with stored food-grade soybeans that move out of province by rail, in shipping containers, to waiting vessels in the Port of Vancouver.
“Normally, $35 million worth of soybeans would be shipped in those two weeks,” said Soy Canada Executive Director Brian Innes, who pointed out that soybeans, more than any other other agricultural commodity, are shipped by container throughout the year.
The strike caused temporary backups at elevators but also created “questions in the minds of our customers about the reliability of the Canadian supply chain,” Innes said. “The lasting impact is that our customers are thinking about how to diversify their supply away from Canada, and that’s a true tragedy.”
While there have been calls for the government to intervene and make future strikes impossible at the port, Innes declined to endorse the idea. Rather, he said his organization is more concerned with the three major shipping conglomerates’ current exemption from Canadian competition law. This has driven up Canadian shipping container rates much higher than those just down the coast in the State of Washington, where U.S. law provides no such exemption from anti-competitive practices, he said.
At the Andersons grain elevators headquarters in Blenheim, logistics specialist Shellie Sawyer said she was glad to see the strike come to an end. “Yes, we absolutely had a disruption. We were affected in one way, shape or form, whether it was CN and CP not taking reservations, not taking rail cars, because they had to wait until things got sorted out on the west coast,” she said.
“Things are back up and moving, and it all kind of worked out for us,” she said, adding that the CN rail strike of 2019 was much worse.
Sawyer agreed with the idea of the government somehow prohibiting future strikes at the port, though she wondered about the actual outcome of such a move. The employees could simply slow down their work to show their displeasure, she said.
Though he declined to comment on the specific impact of the port stroke at Hensall Co-op, Grain Marketing and Energy Manager Jerry Groot acknowledged that “it had some effect on us,” and that he was relieved the strike was over.
At Midnight Acres in Lindsay, owner Joe Hickson said the strike came at a cost of inconvenience and delayed cash flow for his business. He had to shuffle around limited available space in his bins as incoming crop seed arrived at the same time as he found himself loading up delayed outgoing containers of soybeans. The delay also meant that Hickson was busy loading out soybeans as the winter wheat harvest was coming off.
A few clients were told to wait a few hours before bringing in their wheat harvest, Hickson said.
Funds they were counting on from the shipments of those beans were also delayed by six weeks, he said. “But we were fortunate that none of our contracts were cancelled or that we had to re-negotiate any contract pricing due to the fact that we could not make our original delivery dates. So I can not really say that the port strike really cost us anything other than inconvenience.”
