The Teamsters Canada Rail Conference union said on Nov. 26 it reached a tentative deal with Canadian National Railway Co. and that it would end its strike, with normal operations resuming Wednesday, Nov. 27, at 6 a.m. Some 3,200 conductors and railyard workers walked off the job on Nov. 19 (GM Nov. 22, p. 1), prompting many to call for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to call Parliament back in session to end the strike.
“Previous governments routinely violated workers’ right to strike when it came to the rail industry,” said Teamsters Canada President François Laporte on Nov. 26. “This government remained calm and focused on helping parties reach an agreement, and it worked.”
“CN is preparing to resume full rail operations as soon as possible,” said CN Rail CEO Jean-Jacques Ruest. “I would also like to personally thank our employees who kept the railroad moving safely.”
The Teamsters/CN deal must still be ratified by union membership via a secret-ballot electronic voting system that could still take eight weeks to conclude.
The eight-day strike halted shipments of oil, propane, grain, potash, and other products across Canada and threatened to take a multi-billion dollar bite out of the economy, reported Bloomberg, which noted that Montreal-based CN Rail carries about C$250 billion ($189 billion) worth of goods annually. Farmers in Quebec and Ontario faced the prospect of letting their crops rot in the fields, as the strike stalled shipments of propane used for drying.
The nation’s gross domestic product was estimated to have lost as much as C$2.2 billion ($1.65 billion) if the deadlock lasted until Nov. 30, economists at Toronto-Dominion Bank predicted.
“The CN strike up here is causing some very quick headaches,” a Western Canada retail source told Green Markets just prior to the strike’s end. “Propane outages are happening in eastern Canada. All northbound shipments of fertilizer from the U.S. have been halted. Grain elevators are full, waiting on service to continue receiving grain from farmers. If this strike continues on for another week or more, the impacts of shipping product during cold winter months will only make things worse.”
Despite the end of the strike, Saskatoon-based Nutrien Ltd. said on Nov. 26 that it would continue with plans announced on Nov. 25 for a two-week shutdown at its giant Rocanville potash mine, starting on Dec. 2. Nutrien will be laying off some 550 of Rocanville’s 600 employees.
“The altered shipping patterns resulted in the site reaching containment and will still require the two-week downtime to get inventories balanced,” Nutrien spokesman Will Tigley told Bloomberg. “Despite our best efforts to manage through the disruption, the strike created significant backlog in our supply chain and resulted in lost export capacity that cannot be immediately recovered.”
Nutrien had already cautioned that the closure would have a greater impact on international customers than those in North America, saying it was well positioned in the domestic market with its extensive warehouse and terminal system and saw no risk unless the strike was for a prolonged period.
The shutdown equates to about 250,000 mt of potash production, according to Alexis Maxwell, Research Director for Bloomberg Green Markets. Global potash markets have been weak this year, which has already prompted Nutrien and other producers (The Mosaic Co., K+S. Group, Israel Chemicals Ltd., Uralkali, and Belaruskali) to curtail production, with estimates of over 3 million mt idled in second-half 2019 (GM Oct. 11, p. 1; Nov. 15, p. 27).
As the strike continued, furloughs loomed at other employers across Canada, with The Chemical Industry Association of Canada predicting more companies would soon be shutting down operations and laying off workers.