The Port of Prince Rupert on British Columbia’s remote northern coast, although tied to the U.S. Midwest by one ribbon of Canadian National Railways steel that is strikebound now, was not suffering on the third day of the CN locomotive engineers’ strike Monday.

A chief reason, however: storms at sea in Asia.

“We do not believe we have lost any business at the Port of Prince
Rupert, particularly in the container business, due to the rail strike
thus far,” said Don Krusel, president and CEO of the Prince Rupert Port
Authority. However, that is in good part because “severe storms
occurring in Asia … have delayed the arrival of container vessels this
week.”

Apart from that, CN’s operations with management employees would “minimize any potential impact” of the strike itself, he said.

Krusel expresses a larger concern, shared by Port Metro Vancouver and
Canada’s other main international ports at Montreal and Halifax — that
any long strike by the 1,700 CN engineers in the Teamsters Canada Rail
Conference will harm the reputation of Canadian ports and cause
“possible loss of hard-won trade … which may never be recovered.”

A similar concern comes from Robert Ballantyne, president of the
Canadian Industrial Transportation Association, representing shippers.
Ballantyne says the strike “will start to affect service, very badly,
very quickly.” He foresaw companies shutting down production “if they
can’t ship.”

As with Prince Rupert, Canada’s other international ports on the third
day of the strike were little affected. The largest, Port Metro
Vancouver, reports one shipper having diverted its cargo from a port
terminal to rail for transfer to a U.S. destination. No other
diversions had occurred.

At Montreal, the second busiest port, spokesman Yves Gilson said “so
far, one train out of 24 has been delayed. We have only two days’ worth
of containers sitting on our docks, so no backlog.”

Trains were delayed at Halifax, but shipping lines were not diverting cargo, a spokesperson said

Source: The Journal of Commerce Online

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