With Canada’s two main rail companies beginning an unprecedented work stoppage due to a failure to reach an agreement with a union, two food experts say Canadians could soon begin seeing empty grocery shelves and paying more for food.
“As soon as you go from rail to wheels, you’re likely doubling your transportation costs. And at some point, someone is going to have to pay for that, and that’s likely going to be the consumer,” Sylvain Charlebois, a professor at Dalhousie University, told The Epoch Times.
The railway companies, the Canadian National Railway (CN) and Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC), and the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, which represents 9,300 employees, have failed to come to an agreement to keep the workers on the job. As a result, 6,000 CN workers and 3,300 CPKC workers were locked out by the companies, and trains across Canada came to a stop on Aug. 22.
Canada is reliant on rail transportation to ship goods, with the Railway Association of Canada noting that more than half of the country’s exports, valued at more than $1 billion per day, are shipped by rail.
According to Charlebois, the situation is “quite problematic” for Canada’s food supply chain, and “potentially can be catastrophic” if it lasts beyond a week. The food professor predicted that for every day Canadian rail lines are shut down, it will take the entire supply chain a week to recover.
Charlebois said many grocery stores had planned ahead for the railway strike and purchased goods for five to seven days, so Canadians would likely not see large changes to food prices. “Beyond that, all bets are off, I think. We should expect some empty shelves ... I think it will likely impact retail prices,” he said.
Grain Growers of Canada has also warned that the railway stoppage is an “unprecedented crisis” for the grain industry, costing farmers and estimated $43 million per day in the first week alone.
“There’s not a lot of spare capacity available as an alternative and at a reasonable price,” Heaver told The Epoch Times.
Heaver also noted that the rail strike would impact more than just the rail workers, causing mines, lumber mills, and food refrigeration plants to need to close down.