Rail stoppage a hit to Canada's vital transportation sector: experts

The rail strike is just the latest round of labour woes to hit Canada's vital transportation sector.

Industry experts are worried about the blow to the country's economy and its reputation as a whole.

"Reliability is a crucial phenomenon in supply chains," says Trevor Heaver, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.

Heaver says the longer the work trains don't move, the more likely it is buyers will look elsewhere for their product.

Any stoppage will mean a hit.

"The longer it goes on, the stronger the case for buyers to shift more of their sourcing, and that is not a short-term shift, that shift will go on for a significant period of time," he said.

As trains came to a grinding halt, trucking companies were left to pick up the slack.

For some local businesses, that has been enough, for now.

"A lot of our critical elements such as barley are grown and malted right in Alberta. We rely on a lot of trucks to get things to our silos and currently, we're stocked up at Annex. I think the aluminum supply could be another issue but I guess we'll just wait and see," says Andrew Bullied, the founder of Annex Ales and Sodas.

The tourism sector has also taken a hit.

The luxury passenger rail service Rocky Mountaineer says it is unable to travel between Kamloops and Banff/Lake Louise, meaning guests on the company's most popular route are having to unload and hop onto a bus for parts of their journey.

In an online statement, the company says, "This section of the route runs on CPKC tracks, and they will not allow us to operate while their rail traffic controllers are not working due to the labour action. As soon as our operations team receives confirmation from our partners at CPKC that we can begin to run our trains on these tracks again, we will do so. Our team is ready to return to our normal operations at a moment's notice, once the rail line permits us."

Meantime, journeys by air have faced similar turbulence.

Ottawa ordered WestJet and its mechanics into arbitration after a strike in June cancelled about 1,200 flights.

Now, Air Canada pilots voted overwhelmingly in favour of a strike, which could see them out by Sept. 17.

Experts say something has to change.

"We need to have a framework that allows us to compare the economic consequences of a long-term closure of an industry against the cost of intervening at an earlier stage," Heaver said.