(Toronto Star)
Major retailers and shippers
are calling on Ottawa to end a truckers' strike at the Port of Vancouver as imports from Asia pile up on the docks and merchants scramble to find alternatives in time for the back-to-school season.
But Ottawa says there's nothing more it can do to end the 21-day walkout by 1,000 specialized container truckers at Canada's main entry point for fast-growing Asian imports.
"No government can
force a party back to work if they're not interested in going back to work," said AndrĄ?ortin, a spokesman for federal Transport Minister Jean Lapierre. "We have placed the bulk of our trust in the
mediator."
Retailers reacted with scorn to the ministry's comments.
"To take the position that the current dysfunctional negotiations are going to solve the problem is sticking your
head in the sand," said Kevin Evans, western vice-president of the Retail Council of Canada.
Big retailers, like Hudson's Bay Company and Sears Canada, say they've been able to bypass the strike
by putting more of their imports directly on railcars. But the railroads can't pick up all the slack, creating a domino effect that is starting to show up in the Toronto market.
Earlier this week,
for example, a shipment of Heelys ? a cross between sneakers and inline skates ? failed to reach a National Sports store in Oakville because of the strike. A shipment of 6,600 pairs of Heelys arrived in
Vancouver last week, but the Canadian distributor, Cal-Ell Imports Ltd., has been unable to retrieve them.
"We have a container of Heelys locked up on the dock and we have another container
arriving next week which is probably going to Seattle or Tacoma," said a spokesperson for the company who asked not to be named. "We have more containers scheduled to come in August, so who knows
where it's going to end up. It's crippling.
"We're starting to hear more and more stories like that," Evans said.
The truckers, all members of the recently formed Vancouver
Container Truckers Association, haul 40 per cent of the goods arriving at the Vancouver port. That amounts to $32 million worth of merchandise a week, including food, consumer electronics, clothing and
furniture, much of it destined for central Canada. The remaining 60 per cent goes directly onto rail cars.
The cost to shippers in the form of lost business has been "tremendous," said
George Kuhn, executive director of the Canadian International Freight Forwarders Association. "Some of our members are really suffering.
"Our whole transportation system is heading towards
a serious, highly disruptive and costly gridlock situation," Kuhn wrote in a letter appealing to Prime Minister Paul Martin for help.
Kuhn said he has not yet received a reply. Calls to the PMO
late yesterday were not returned.
Many of the goods that leave the port by truck eventually make their way to central Canada via big national retail warehouses in British Columbia or small local
suppliers. The situation is reaching a crisis point as the last of three terminals at Vancouver's port is at capacity and will stop accepting truck-bound containers today, port authority president Gordon
Houston said in an interview yesterday.
Steamships from Asia have already begun dumping Vancouver-bound goods in U.S. ports, such as Tacoma and Seattle, a trend that will accelerate next week,
Houston said.
And Canadian railroads are no longer delivering containers to the port because they know they won't be picked up, Houston added. The result is a backlog in Montreal and Halifax. The
whole mess is giving the port a black eye, he added.
"Sears Canada are telling us because of this Vancouver is seen as unreliable. We've had several large clients say the same thing,"
Houston said.
The Bay earlier this year started routing some Asian imports through the Panama Canal to enter Canada via the port at Halifax, while Sears said yesterday it's considering all its
options.
"For us, we have quite a bit of merchandise in the pipeline, six to eight weeks worth before we start to feel anything," said Sears Canada spokesman Vince Power. The Bay also said
the dispute hasn't yet affected supplies. But the retailers and shippers are starting to worry about the lack of progress in negotiations, which is why they want Ottawa to intervene.
The truckers are
all independent contractors who work for brokers, which act as middlemen between the port and the retailers. Officially non-unionized, the truckers recently formed an association, which called the strike.
The shippers say the negotiations are complicated by the fact that the association is not actually a union and leaders are inexperienced in collective bargaining.
Panalpina Group, a shipping
and logistics firm, has been advising Canadian customers that the Vancouver strike is beginning to affect the rail car supply, adding seven to 10 day's delay in Vancouver before containers are loaded.
Diverting products through Edmonton or Calgary is no longer an option, the company said.
But Joe Milner, assistant professor of operations management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School
of Management, said he thinks the main impact of the strike is limited to Vancouver.
"We're not in dire straits yet and I don't see it coming as long as the port functions at two-thirds capacity
and Seattle and Tacoma can handle the overload," Milner said.
Ottawa appointed a mediator early in the dispute. But the mediator called off the talks a week ago citing lack of progress. No
further meetings are scheduled.
The dispute is just the latest problem at the Vancouver port, where rapid growth in trade with Asia has pushed its facilities to the limits. It now handles twice as
many containers as it did five years ago, Houston said.
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