An emergency meeting in Ottawa could provide a glimmer of hope for farmers unable to move their grain to market.
Prince Albert MP Randy Hoback, along with his Conservative colleagues Luc Berthold and John Barlow, managed to convince members of all parties that sit on the House Committee On Agriculture to hold an emergency meeting on the issue March 19.
“We were surprised,” Hoback said. “We figured the Liberals would do what the Liberals normally do and try to adjourn the meeting or do something so it wouldn’t happen, but in this situation they agreed with us and agreed to do the meeting on the 19th.”
The MP said they wanted the meeting on March 15, as that’s the day the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific railways are supposed to table their game plan for moving the grain, but the Liberal majority on the committee blocked that move.
Hoback said when the committee met March 7, some action resulted. CN replaced their CEO and gave farmers an apology. Farm Credit Canada has come with a game plan to help with the lack of cash flow farmers are seeing due to being unable to sell their product.
“Shining a light on the issue does help a bit and it puts pressure on the government.”
Hoback said there needs to be more action from the federal government besides the meeting. He said the federal cabinet needs to give an order-in-council to the railways that fines them if they don’t transport a certain amount of grain.
Liberal MP Ralph Goodale has told the Western Producer his government is waiting to see documents from both major railways about their plans to fix the backlog before resorting to an order-in-council.
Complicating matters is legislation. The Conservatives had passed bill C-30 while in government, which fined the railways for lack of performance. That legislation expired a year ago. That legislation is to be replaced with C-49, which Hoback said is stuck in the Senate and is in need of amendments.
“It’s an omnibus-type bill. It’s got air transportation, it’s got semi-truck transportation. It’s got a variety of things tied into one bill including rail,” he said. “We’ve asked them to separate the rail part of it out of that bill so we could deal with it separately and avoid a situation like the one we have today and the Liberals refused to do that last fall.”
Hoback said he didn’t think the legislation would be out of the Senate until the end of May.
“What I would suggest to them [the Liberals] is do the order-in-council until C-49 gets the appropriate amendments and then moves through the Senate and then comes back to the House and you get a better piece of legislation.”
The MP said there were signs there was going to be a backlog and that the government could have been more proactive by bringing in an order-in-council around Christmastime.
“It’s frustrating. It’s really frustrating,” he said. “It didn’t have to be this way. It just absolutely didn’t have to be this way.”
