Collenette plan to reduce truck traffic is flawed and unrealistic, opponents say

OTTAWA (Oct. 2, 2002) — Federal Transport Minister David Collenette’s proposal to shift more freight from trucks to rail and water in Ontario is flawed and unrealistic, transportation groups said yesterday.

After Monday’s throne speech, Collenette told The Toronto Star that reducing the number of trucks n the highway would reduce congestion on Highway 401 and help Ottawa meet commitments to the Kyoto Accord, a plan aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“It comes down to a choice for communities — do people opt to have more frequent, high-speed freight trains in the community or have more and more trucks on their roads, competing with other traffic and fouling the environment,” Collenette said.

“Shippers use trucks because they meet the service requirements needed by Canadian companies to be competitive,” replied Lisa MacGillivray, president of the Canadian Industrial Transportation Association, which represents about 200 shippers.

She added that marine and rail operators are “hampered by closed-boxed thinking that allows monopolistic practices by service providers to continue unchecked. These entities, some private, some mandated through legislation, have little incentive to be responsive, competitive and meet customer requirements, yet they are touted as a means to meet Canada’s Kyoto obligations.

“We’ve seen Canada’s two railways make improvements,” MacGillivray noted, “but they’re still almost a decade and a half behind the trucking industry.”

In an interview with the Toronto Star yesterday, Canadian Trucking Alliance chief executive David Bradley responded by saying Collenette’s strategy doesn’t make sense and even if it were possible, it wouldn’t improve the environment. “There is no evidence to support that removing trucks from the highway would be good for the environment,” he said.

Ironically, a Transport Canada study on Ontario’s surface transportation network found that, in the Greater Toronto Area, even if the railways were able to achieve their hoped-for market share of intermodal traffic, the impact on highway capacity would be minimal.

A year ago, reports surfaced that Collenette was considering pumping $2 billion into CP Rail’s Expressway roll-on/roll-off intermodal service, which operates in the Windsor-Montreal corridor. The money would be used to upgrade track and build a second rail line between Toronto and Windsor so trains could run simultaneously in opposite directions. The report indicated that Expressway would operate as a private-public partnership. Collenette reportedly backed the plan as a way to reduce congestion on the 401.