Has anyone seen Carney Canada’s Major Projects Office (MPO) express train?
We have scores of folk waiting at whistle stops across the country hoping to catch a glimpse of it as it rockets by on its way to revitalizing resource extraction investment and fast-tracking energy export projects from coast to coast to coast.
No sign of that train, way out west.
Maybe it’s refuelling. Though we hope as an aspiring energy superpower, the fuel is something other than imported diesel refined from Canadian crude.
More likely, the IMO train schedule is undergoing reality revisions.
Bureaucratic busyness and hiring booms
Digesting the Project Accelerator Group’s most recent MPO monthly intelligence report, we find a whole lot of bureaucratic busyness generating spreadsheets filled with numbers, estimates, tranches and project status updates.
What we don’t find is much MPO express train movement.
Maybe that’s because it has more passengers waiting to board.
As the report’s executive summary points out, “the MPO is managing the most complex coordinated federal approval exercise in Canadian history, with a team that is still hiring.”
When that hiring will stop is anyone’s guess, but if the numbers included in the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s report on Canada’s public sector hiring boom are any indicator, the MPO hiring has just begun.
That would be on brand for the federal Liberals: rearrange cars to turn an economic express train into a civil service gravy train. Fast-track votes first; deliver on promises later – if ever.
The need for taxpayer transparency
What about an updated MPO express train arrival schedule?
No clarity there, according to Resource Works writer Don MacLachlan’s MPO: Major Projects Obscuration? analysis, which proposes that the MPO keep taxpayers regularly advised of the nation-building fast-track train’s progress.
“How about the MPO posting online a monthly update of progress on projects?” he suggests.
MacLachlan also wonders how the MPO’s initial $213.8 million budget is being spent.
More government obscuration there.
The lumpenproletariat might be wondering, too, about projects that do not have MPO blessings.
The Port of Vancouver and the rest of the Asia-Pacific Gateway need a replacement now for the Second Narrows rail bridge | CNR
The Second Narrows rail bridge chokepoint
Workaday transportation infrastructure chokepoints such as the Port of Vancouver’s (PoV) Second Narrows rail bridge, for example.
The single-track CN (TSX:CNR) rail link between the North Shore and Metro Vancouver is a critical piece of PoV cargo movement infrastructure.
As CN points out, the North Shore alone moves more trade than any other Canadian port, and almost all of the cargo handled by North Shore terminals travels by rail over the bridge.
That rail traffic has increased significantly since the July 2020 completion of the North Shore’s $600 million G3 grain terminal, which alone boosted the PoV’s annual grain-handling capacity by eight million tonnes.
Marine traffic that transits the Second Narrows complicates the movement of North Shore bulk cargo because the bridge is regularly closed to rail traffic for long stretches to allow the fleet of oil tankers and other commercial ships being serviced by the PoV to move through the narrows.
When the vertical lift bridge malfunctions, as it did for four days at the end of February, that marine traffic flow stops.
A threat to the energy superpower brand
And that is bad for more than the PoV’s already subpar efficiency and reliability reputation.
It is also bad for Carney Canada’s energy superpower brand.
A 57-year-old single-track rail bridge charged with carrying 43.7 million tonnes of cargo annually that is regularly sidelined for five to six-hour stretches to allow tanker traffic to navigate port waters won’t cut it in the 21st-century trade-lane major leagues.
A North Shore-Metro Vancouver rail connection that eliminates cargo movement interruption complications for commercial shipping and adds a rapid transit rail link for North Shore commuters should be atop Canada’s transportation project priority list.
It should not be left waiting with other critical infrastructure improvements for the arrival of Carney Canada’s inert MPO express train.
This article originally appeared in The Substack Shipping News. Timothy Renshaw can be reached at [email protected].
Resource Works News