CALGARY, Alberta — Reuters reports that Canadian Pacific Railway’s chief executive urged Ottawa and provincial governments on Tuesday to contribute millions of dollars to new tracks, freight terminals and better border crossings aimed at improving Canada’s rail system and curing highway congestion.
New rail projects, with costs shared between the industry and governments, would be the best way to improve the efficiency of trade with the United States, expected to triple over the next 20 years, CP Rail CEO Rob Ritchie said.
Canada’s railways cannot afford all the investments themselves, and are at a disadvantage because of de facto subsidies that the trucking industry’s shippers receive, Ritchie said.
“What I’m saying is work out the subsidies for the shippers who use trucks, capitalize that, put it into the railway, and we’ll maintain the railway,” he said. “We’ll run on that railway and share our land corridor assets, which are incredibly important to Canada,” he told reporters after speaking to a business audience.
Ritchie said he believed the trucking industry was subsidized because its shippers’ freight rates did not come close to funding the full cost of building and maintaining highways. Railways, meanwhile, were solely responsible for full operation of their lines and rights of way.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, border crossing points between the two countries have suffered massive truck congestion as security checks intensified.
Ritchie cited the Windsor-Detroit crossing, where a quarter of Canada-U.S. trade flows, most of it on 10,000 trucks a day.
Trade between Canada and the United States totals more than $1 billion dollars a day.
Canadian Pacific, the country’s No. 2 railway, and partner Borealis Transportation Infrastructure Trust have proposed a new rail tunnel under the Detroit River to ease the congestion.
It is one of several options being considered under a plan to include funding of C$150 million ($96 million) each by the federal and Ontario governments. A decision is expected by the end of November.
Similar funding ideas could be used at numerous other border points across the country, or to expand rail lines between major cities like Toronto and Montreal, Ritchie said.
He conceded that selling governments on spending public money for such projects will not be easy, and will require heavy research on boiling down the subsidies that various transport sectors get.
“I think we’re making progress at the federal level. The provincial level, being more highway-oriented, is proving to be a little more problematic,” he said.
“But I believe also we are approaching crises in certain pinch points of our national transportation system.”