Reading Time: 5 minutes Ottawa has long been in the business of trying to fix the problem of transporting Prairie grain to the west coast by rail. Yet the issues don’t get solved. “None of the policies introduced by Raitt or Ritz did anything to deal with the surge,” University of Manitoba’s Barry Prentice says. “Worse, they have done […] Read more
Could containers be the answer to the West’s grain shipping woes?
A containerized grain supply chain would enhance competition, says University of Manitoba economist
Plenty of blame to go around for grain shipping debacle
A year into the great grain fiasco, it’s no longer only about the railways
Reading Time: 6 minutes UPDATED, June 21, 2015: The 2013 harvest should have been a time of wild celebration. Prairie farmers had produced a bin-busting crop with a record-smashing 76 million tonnes, and with good crop prices, the entire West should have struck up the music and started to dance. Instead, logistics turned the dream into a nightmare, and […] Read more
The Journey: A quick history of shipping grain to port by rail
From Prairie farm to ocean port, our rail lines still shock the imagination with their engineering and bravado
Reading Time: 9 minutes It’s a trip that is so formidable, it weakened the knees of generations of politicians, entrepreneurs and engineers alike. Everybody could tell the northern Great Plains would be an ideal place for growing cereal crops, and they knew too that the world would love to eat what we grow, but getting those crops to port […] Read more
Grain wreck: Weaknesses in the freight system
The big crop and awful winter weren’t the only causes of 2014’s rail fiasco, says transport expert Mark Hemmes. There are also deep systemic issues that must be resolved
Reading Time: 3 minutes If there’s anyone out there with a bird’s eye view of the rail system and exactly what happened last winter, it’s Quorum Corporation’s Mark Hemmes. The organization is the federally appointed monitor of grain transportation, charged with tracking how efficiently grain is moved out of the Prairies following partial deregulation of grain transportation around the […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
