With strike action looming on the horizon railways in Canada are likely to be stopped next week.
CN and CPKC are both set to lock out workers on the 22nd, the date that a possible strike was set for by the Canada Industrial Relations Board.
Vice president of grain for CN Rail David Przednowec says that the current labour situation is taking up a bulk of the current conversation in the industry.
"Just yesterday on the 15th, CN received a response from the Minister of Labour and CN had requested that the Minister use section 107 of the Canadian Labour Code to refer the dispute between CN and the TCRC to binding arbitration and the response that CN received is that the ministers choosing not to use Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code at this time."
Section 107 would allow the two sides to move into binding arbitration, which would bring in arbitrators to decide what should be included in a new contract.
Przednowec says that he hopes both sides can negotiate a new contract soon.
"TCRC listens to the minister's strong messaging and engaged meaningfully at the negotiating table, and the minister needs to reconsider his negotiation if that doesn't happen. As to where things are right now from a bargaining perspective, CN's made four offers to the TCRC since January, those offers have all been rejected and no single counter offers have been received at this time, so no meaningful progress at the bargaining table."
Because negotiation has slowed ahead of the date, CN is winding down some of its operations.
"As a consequence of that, CN's initiated a phase shutdown of its Canadian network, and unless there's no meaningful progress of negotiating table, that's going to cause it, the continued organized shutdown of the railroad."
"At this time it's really specific to hazardous goods and those are things that you can't have running around on the network as you plan for an organized shutdown of operations, if that's what needs to happen. But at this point, we have to start making plans for what might happen down the road here. So that's where things stand from a labour perspective."
Aside from the strike, Przednowec says that rail movement has been going well for CN
"Grain movement has been, I would say, stronger than we would have anticipated. If we were say back in April or May you take a look at what's happened through July into early August, I'd say it's been a stronger run rate than we would have expected."