By Naomi Powell, National Post; February 26, 2020
Rail blockades are upending Canadian meat and grain supply chains, pushing storage capacity to its limit and squeezing the flow of feed and propane to farms as producers rack up millions in additional costs and lost sales.
So far this year, grain shipments to Canadian ports have dropped by 1.2 million tonnes, with the most intense losses occurring over the past month, when environmental and Indigenous-rights activists erected random blockades protesting the construction of TC Energy Corp.’s planned $6.6 billion Coastal GasLink project, said Mark Hemmes, president of Quorum Corp., an Alberta company monitoring Canada’s grain movements for the federal government.