Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Manitoba Premier Gary Doer today dropped into the Hudson Bay port town of Churchill, Man., each bearing $24 million for upgrades to its deep-water Arctic port and the rail line connecting it to the Prairie grain belt.
Hudson Bay Railway Co., which operates the port and grain terminal and the 810-mile railway connecting Churchill to The Pas, has pledged another $20 million for rail line maintenance as part of a renewed 10-year agreement by its parent company, Denver-based OmniTrax, bringing the total pledged funding to $68 million.
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Of that, $60 million will be spent on upgrades to the rail line, which ferries Prairie grain for export — 480,000 tonnes in 2006 and a projected near-record 600,000 tonnes this year, mostly for the Canadian Wheat Board — as well as passenger traffic and supplies for remote communities in northern Manitoba and Nunavut.
The remaining $8 million, cost-shared by the federal and Manitoba governments, will fund port improvements through the Churchill Gateway Development Corp., whose members include the federal and provincial governments and OmniTrax.
Doer said the investment in the port and railway “is a bridge to allow for commercial revenues to continue growing into the future.”
Churchill, in use since the 1930s, is considered by many to be the most efficient route for Prairie grain from eastern Saskatchewan and northwestern Manitoba to reach export position, and its inland location allows for faster recycling of grain hopper cars into the cross-country handling system.
However, the site has long had its detractors, who have argued its continued operation has been underwritten largely by government intervention and CWB shipments to Europe and other destinations overseas, with little other commercial interest in the shipping route. The port also suffers from a relatively short shipping season. The federal government sold the port and rail line to OmniTrax in 1997.
More recently, though, the port’s shipping season is expected to continue to lengthen as Hudson Bay thaws earlier and remains open later each year, and the port has also been touted as a base from which Canada may assert its regional sovereignty, challenged in recent years by neighbouring nations along the Arctic circle.
In announcing the Churchill funding as well as cash for a number of Arctic research projects, Harper said a strong and sovereign Arctic must be a healthy and prosperous Arctic, and cited the upgrades as important to the economic development of the region.
“Like I’ve said so many times before, use it or lose it is the first principle of sovereignty,” Harper said in a release.
