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Economy

After 140-Odd Years, Can’t We Figure Rail Out Yet?

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Zinchuk

A typical train these days has over 100 cars. Each rail car, depending on the load, is at least one, and often several truckloads. A train needs two crew to operate it. Are you going to come up with 100 to 200 truck drivers to replace that one, individual train, as well as the trucks, trailers, and space on the highways in a moment’s notice, and then do that for the entire economy?

In all the fuss about the Canadian rail disruption, one thing jumped out at me. Here’s how the National Post reported it:

“Despite the economic impacts, the Canadian Industrial Relations Board ruled earlier this month that the railway workers are not an essential service.”

Every member of this board should be sacked. Immediately. Because if rail is not essential, nothing is.

Did none of them pay attention in grade school? Canada was built on the railway. British Columbia joined confederation as a result, and all the gaps in between were filled in in large part because there was rail.

Yet every few years, Canadians and the Canadian economy is held hostage by some sort of disruption involving rail, usually a labour one, but occasionally a protest movement or even the weather, as if this is our first year living in the great white north.

The playbook is worn out already. After several days of pain and homage being paid to the rights of the workers to strike (yet no one talks about the rights of companies to lock out workers), the federal government eventually takes action and things get back to normal.

In this case, the feds let the entire rail network of CN and CPKC shut down on Thursday, Aug. 22, before ordering binding arbitration. But as I write this the morning of Friday, Aug. 23, the Teamsters have served strike notice on CN about an hour ago. I’m not going to try to keep up with all the developments. Maybe by the time this is published, it will all be resolved. But it seemed like that resolution was yesterday, and it fell apart today, so who knows?

And frankly, I don’t care, and I don’t think you should, either. Perhaps the union members have a point in their issues. Maybe the rail companies do, too. Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter. Sort it out. Put on you big boy/girl shorts/panties. Make it work.

At no point, ever, in the history of this nation, has rail service not been essential. From farmers needing to ship their grain at harvest to cities needing chlorine for water treatment to pavers needing asphalt from the Lloydminster refinery before the fall paving season ends, rail is utterly critical to our existence as a nation.

And anyone who says we can just backfill with trucks is a fool. A typical train these days has over 100 cars. Each rail car, depending on the load, is at least one, and often several truckloads. A train needs two crew to operate it. Are you going to come up with 100 to 200 truck drivers to replace that one, individual train, as well as the trucks, trailers, and space on the highways in a moment’s notice, and then do that for the entire economy?

Let’s look back at the rail blockades of 2020 in support of the Wet’suwet’en opposition to the Coastal GasLink pipeline. Because the blockades were related to First Nations politics, the federal Liberal government was loathe to step in. In a nod to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, it proved that in the 21st century, “some animals are more equal than others.” In this case, some First Nations were more equal than others, and could block rail lines at will, dramatically impacting parts of the economy. Never mind that the pipeline that was so ardently opposed is now the salvation for other First Nations bands to go ahead with their own Cedar LNG facility, dramatically improving their economic prospects.

Did the government perhaps learn something from the 2020 blockades – that rail disruption can’t allow these things to go on forever, especially because it would now impact the entire economy? Maybe. But if so, maybe the federal minister should have acted before an actual stoppage took place.

And that’s the key thing. Rail is nothing new to Canada. It’s almost as old as the nation itself. And yet there’s always something causing grief. Sometimes rail performance is blamed on snow in the mountains, or cold, as if this is the first time there’s ever been cold, or snow, or both, in Canada. Except they made it work for over 140-odd years, why are we now unable to make things work? Why, after the same 140-odd years of operation, we still have labour strife over rest periods and operations? Hasn’t that been enough time to figure it out, both from the company and labour sides?

How many more decades, nay, centuries do we need to figure out how to run a railroad?

Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online, and occasional contributor to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Carbon Tax

The book the carbon taxers don’t want you to read

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By Franco Terrazzano

Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote a 500-page book praising carbon taxes.

Well, I just wrote a book smashing through the government’s carbon tax propaganda.

It tells the inside story of the fight against the carbon tax. And it’s THE book the carbon taxers don’t want you to read.

My book is called Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax.


 
Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax 

Every now and then, the underdog wins one.

And it looks like that’s happening in the fight against the carbon tax.

It’s not over yet, but support for the carbon tax is crumbling. Some politicians vow to scrap it. Others hide behind vague plans to repackage it. But virtually everyone recognizes support for the current carbon tax has collapsed.

It wasn’t always this way.

For about a decade now, powerful politicians, government bureaucrats, academics, media elites and even big business have been pushing carbon taxes on the people.

But most of the time, politicians never asked the people if they supported carbon taxes. In other words, carbon taxes, and the resulting higher gas prices and heating bills, were forced on us.

We were told it was good for us. We were told carbon taxes were inevitable. We were told politicians couldn’t win elections without carbon taxes, even though the politicians that imposed them didn’t openly run on them. We were told that we needed to pay carbon taxes if we wanted to leave a healthy environment for our kids and grandkids. We were told we needed to pay carbon taxes if we wanted to be respected in the international community.

In this decade-long fight, it would have been understandable if the people had given up and given in to these claims. It would have been easier to accept what the elites wanted and just pay the damn bill. But against all odds, ordinary Canadians didn’t give up.

Canadians knew you could care about the environment and oppose carbon taxes. Canadians saw what they were paying at the gas station and on their heating bills, and they knew they were worse off, regardless of how many politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and academics tried to convince them otherwise. Canadians didn’t need advanced degrees in economics, climate science or politics to understand they were being sold a false bill of goods.

Making it more expensive for a mom in Port Hope to get to work, or grandparents in Toronto to pay their heating bill, or a student in Coquitlam to afford food won’t reduce emissions in China, Russia, India or the United States. It just leaves these Canadians, and many like them, with less money to afford everything else.

Ordinary Canadians understood carbon taxes amount to little more than a way for governments to take more money from us and dictate how we should live our lives. Ordinary Canadians also saw through the unfairness of the carbon tax.

Many of the elites pushing the carbon tax—the media, politicians, taxpayer-funded professors, laptop activists and corporate lobbyists—were well off and wouldn’t feel the brunt of carbon taxes. After all, living in a downtown condo and clamouring for higher carbon taxes doesn’t require much gas, diesel or propane.

But running a business, working in a shop, getting kids to soccer and growing food on the farm does. These are the Canadians the political class forgot about when pushing carbon taxes. These are the Canadians who never gave up. These are the Canadians who took time out of their busy lives to sign petitions, organize and attend rallies, share posts on social media, email politicians and hand out bumper stickers.

Because of these Canadians, the carbon tax could soon be swept onto the ash heap of history. I wrote this book for two reasons.

The first is because these ordinary Canadians deserve it. They worked really hard for a really long time against the odds. When all the power brokers in government told them, “Do what we say—or pay,” they didn’t give up. They deserve to know the time and effort they spent fighting the carbon tax mattered. They deserve all the credit.

Thank you for everything you did.

The second reason I wrote this book is so people know the real story of the carbon tax. The carbon tax was bad from the start and we fought it from the start. By reading this book, you will get the real story about the carbon tax, a story you won’t find anywhere else.

This book is important because if the federal Liberals’ carbon tax is killed, the carbon taxers will try to lay blame for their defeat on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They will try to say that carbon taxes are a good idea, but Trudeau bungled the policy or wasn’t a good enough salesman. They will try to revive the carbon tax and once again make you pay more for gas, groceries, and home heating.

Just like with any failed five-year plan, there is a lingering whiff among the laptop class and the taxpayer-funded desk rulers that this was all a communication problem, that the ideal carbon tax hasn’t been tried yet. I can smell it outside my office building in Ottawa, where I write these words. We can’t let those embers smoulder and start a fire again.

This book shows why the carbon tax is and always will be bad policy for ordinary Canadians.

Franco’s note: You can pre-order a copy of my new book, Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax, here: https://www.amazon.ca/Axing-Tax-Rise-Canadas-Carbon

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Business

Will Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs End In Disaster Or Prosperity?

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By J.D. Foster

“Liberation Day” has come. So what does it mean? Beats the hell out of me.

What we know is that President Trump’s avalanche of tariffs was to hit a peak on April 2; not end, mind you; not necessarily “the” peak, as more could be on the way; but a peak.

No Trump policy more completely breaks with America’s past than his “beautiful” tariffs on just about everything coming into the United States from just about anywhere.

Will this new policy liberate American manufacturing from foreign shackles? Will it usher in a new era of prosperity, keeping in mind the United States had for many years the consistently best-performing economy in the industrialized world, even overcoming the many inane obstacles erected by the Biden-Harris Administration?

Or will it leave the United States isolated, friendless, and weakened?

The correct answer at this point is no one knows, not even the bloviating talking heads on TV confidently predicting demise or Shangri-la.

Think of it this way. Suppose you’re a restaurant chef and a woman hands you a new recipe. Her father turns 75 soon and they want to have a party at the restaurant. The recipe is for the father’s favorite dish, one her mother made for years.

The recipe looks old, with odd ingredients and processes you’ve not seen before. Now judge it as a chef.

You can’t. Even as you start chopping and dicing, mixing ingredients as instructed, you’re not too sure how this is going to turn out. You have to wait until the dish is on the plate and taste it.

That’s the case with Trump’s tariffs. How will this all turn out? It’s too soon to tell.

The stock market sure doesn’t like it, but why should it? The investor class doesn’t understand this any better than you do. What they do understand is this new policy has upended assumptions and created enormous new uncertainties. We know that dish as those ingredients are always good for a big pullback.

Much of the confusion arises because we don’t know the underlying policy and likely this uncertainty is intentional. Trump likes keeping his counterparts, in this case our trading partners, guessing. If it means Americans are confused for a bit, Trump’s cool with that. Breaking eggs to make an omelette. It will pass and America will be great again afterward. Bon appetite.

If the core policy is to erect massive and mostly permanent tariff walls behind which American firms can hide, then we know how this will turn out: America, meet the dustbin of history.

If the core policy is to force our trading partners to deal with America fairly by reducing their trade barriers after which Trump will remove his tariffs, then this could turn out very well. Tariffs (and non-tariff barriers) in the U.S. and those of our trading partners would fall, reinvigorating the free trade that has energized prosperity for decades.

Which is it? Walls and doom or freedom and prosperity? Again, too early to tell.

Whatever else Trump does in his second term, these tariffs will define his presidency, akin in consequence to Ronald Reagan’s pro-growth tax cuts and Joe Biden’s inflation.

Trump in his second term clearly lives by the saying, “go bold or go home.” He’s got “bold” down pat. We will see over the next year or so whether he and the Republicans go home. Has he liberated Democrats from any fear of Republicans in the mid-terms or in 2028, or he’s liberated America from any fear of Democratic socialism and wokism returning in our lifetimes. The chips are all-in. Soon we will see the cards. Uncertainty, indeed.

JD Foster is the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and former chief economist and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He now resides in relative freedom in the hills of Idaho.

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