I was reading a story not long ago about the current issue that farmers in Saskatchewan are having with our national railway companies.
The rails are getting backlogged with material goods and oil, which has restricted the transportation of grain.
When Canada’s railways were first built, the nation was young, and similar to the United States, national unity had a lot to do with having everything connected by rail.
That was a strong demand that drove the construction of railways all those years ago.
Railways brought national unity, created wealth, created entire towns, and helped bring Canada into the modern age and helped Canadians enjoy a first world quality of life.
There were a lot of reasons to build railways back then, and I guarantee nobody who made them was worried about the environment, or appeasing a certain voter base that has been the driving force that is pushing Canada backwards, not forwards.
The relentless consultation with Indigenous groups to build more railways or more pipelines is noble but ineffective.
What happened to Indigenous peoples during the age of colonization can’t ever be undone or adequately apologized for.
The motivation for Indigenous peoples to allow more stuff being built on top of their land often doesn’t exist, in the same way that anyone who is hired to conduct an environmental assessment before a railway or pipeline is built dislikes resource development in general, because the inherent nature of it is tearing down trees, moving rivers around and creating pollution. Moreover, a wealthy CEO and their board of directors are not exactly what environmentalists will ever see as good people.
Many entities that are part of the process of approving the construction of railways and pipelines have no actual interest in seeing those things built.
This has happened because the Government of Canada has let it happen and Saskatchewan’s farmers, who can’t get their grain to market, are a casualty of wilful bad planning.
Trillions of dollars of oil and an expanding gross domestic product are subject to re-election campaigns and the whims of politicians who, unlike when the first railways were built, are now more concerned for what is best for them to stay in power.
Canada’s first railways were built in a free-market. Canada’s pipelines are not and that is why we don’t have enough of them and the people, who till the soil to feed the inhabitants of this country, are getting shafted as a result.
The laws of supply and demand govern the free market, which is why in such a market you can cover an entire country the size of Canada with all the railways it needs within 50 years.
We need more now but Canada is no longer a free market. To make things worse we also need transnational pipelines.
The wealth this country has to offer, that can put more money in the pockets of Canadians, is trapped and the federal Liberals don’t want to talk about those issues or do anything about them, because they want to cling to power.
In place of what the free market and the wealth of this country could offer all Canadians, it has been interchanged with debt.
Debt is easier and less politically dangerous to support than forcing British Columbia to build a pipeline.
Debt, however, is going to make future generations of Canadians poorer. They are already going to have less wealth than their parents and buying a house and having it paid off before they die is quickly becoming a pipe dream for a lot of Canada’s youth.
The government can try to fight the free-market and to that extent, capitalism, but it is a physical thing, comprised of everyone on this planet, who are each guided by rational self-interest that pushes them to make decisions that will best allow them to be happy and wealthy.
If the Liberals don’t want to sell our massive amounts of oil, grain, copper, nickel and wood, then the market will adjust, we will lose buyer confidence and in turn sales, and there will be less money and jobs to go around for the people living in Canada.
Build more pipelines. Once the pipelines are built, there will be less need for oil to be transported by train. That will free up more rail cars for crops to be shipped, and that will create a better situation, and more wealth, for Saskatchewan’s farmers.
