More port silliness
Halifax's two international shipping terminals were built in the 1960s, and they've had their ups and downs through the years.
The port profited handsomely from the United States' trade embargo of Cuba, as millions of tonnes of Cuban-bound Canadian wheat shipped through our lucky city. But with the disintegration of the Soviet Union that business collapsed completely, leaving behind only wishful thinking and the abandoned silos that still loom, both physically and psychologically, over the South End.
(Since they caught fire a few years ago, there's been talking of tearing down the silos. But Soviet-inspired architecture has a real role to play, if you ask me: the silos and the hulking Fenton Tower make everything else in town look that much better in comparison.)
Regardless, the Cuba trade was about half the port's business, and here we are 20 years later and the terminals are still only at half capacity.
So how do our thoughtful and wise political leaders deal with shipping terminals at 50 percent capacity? That's right: they build more of them.
Never mind that shipping traffic is decreasing, not increasing, and never mind that Halifax has lost its two largest shipping companies in the past year (China Shipping and Maersk, the latter of which handled over 10 percent of the port's traffic)-- if we're to believe the newly published Gateway study, shipping traffic will go up, up, up forever more.
To handle all this happy shipping, the study tells us:
The Port of Halifax, the third-largest container port in Canada, is the obvious hub for this increased container flow, and there are potential opportunities for the planned container terminal in the Strait of Canso at Melford, a terminal in Sydney and increased traffic for the ports of Saint John and St. John’s.
And in order to be able to ship all these imagined containers moving through non-existent ports in Canso and Sydney down to those filthy rich Americans who will never run out of money, we'll need to build a nice shiny new four-lane highway between Truro and Canso.
I'll read the ballyhooed Gateway study myself, as soon as I can, but here's Charles Cirtwell in this morning's Chronicle-Herald:
Cirtwell has a different agenda, and it's not one that I share, but he's completely right on this issue.Charles Cirtwell, acting president of the Atlantic Institute of Market Studies, said he sees nothing new in this most recent publication.
"What we have here is another study telling us the exact same thing: Global trends are up; traffic into the East Coast is up; containers are the future," he said Friday.
"Those are the things people have been saying for quite some time; even the mantra (Mr. MacKay) encouraged us to say, ‘Deep water, ice-free.’ Anybody who has been involved in the port (of Halifax) has been saying that for 150 years. So really this is an exercise in the federal government convincing themselves that there is a justification for the $2 billion they set aside a few months ago."
Mr. Cirtwell was referring to $2.1 billion that the federal government has budgeted over the next seven years for its national gateways and corridors strategy. Ottawa has already spent about $1 billion on the West Coast to develop infrastructure for the Asia Pacific trade.
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