CentrePort Canada is shaping up to be a consulting engineer's paradise.
The bold "inland port" concept taking shape in Winnipeg is moving at a fast pace this summer.
The asphalt was being mixed in May to begin construction on a major highway four-laning project to turn the city’s north end into a massive international intermodal transportation hub.
Located next to Richardson International Airport, Winnipeg is seeking to capitalize on its mid-Canada geography location to entice the global logistics world to invest in the Manitoba capital.
The plans for CentrePort Canada call for the creation of a cluster of air, highway and railway links to transform 20,000 acres of greenfield property - to be designated as a free-trade zone - into a business park of manufacturing, distribution centres and intermodal yards.
Diane Gray, CentrePort’s president and CEO, said this is the kind of transportation infrastructure project that will have legs well into the future and will reach Northern Ontario.
“It’s a multi-decade project and that’s (what's) exciting about it. It’s just good, not for the next five years, but the next century,” said Gray, a former provincial deputy of finance.
Winnipeg has been the country’s transportation crossroads dating back to the grain boom when it was Eastern Canada’s Gateway to the West. Back then, the movement of goods was west to east. Now, logistics analysts are advancing a north-south mid-continent trade corridor that begins in Mexico, advances through the U.S. Midwestern states, up to Winnipeg and veers west and east to the saltwater container ports.
This transportation scenario received senior government approval last year when Ottawa and Manitoba committed $212 million to build CentrePort Way, an interstate quality expressway being fast-tracked this summer.
It’s a high-speed link to the city’s beltway – the Perimeter Highway - and the Trans-Canada, and will tie together the industrial lands and future air cargo opportunities at the airport, which has a $600- million terminal construction project underway.
Other Canadian cities have studied intermodal concepts, but Gray lays out a marketing case for Winnipeg as the second-fastest growing city in Canada with the third-busiest cargo airport. She plays up its diversified manufacturing base, especially in electronics parts and a large aerospace industry.
Besides being a hub for Canada’s largest trucking companies, Winnipeg is a major railhead for three Class One carriers – Canadian National, Canadian Pacific and Burlington Northern Sante Fe – and millions have poured into road interchanges and improvements to Highway 75 leading south to a busy border crossing at Emerson.
Gray said Winnipeg is a “natural staging area” for mineral development to the Far North and beyond through the Port of Churchill and over-the-Pole air cargo routes. CentrePort is a creature of provincial legislation.
Beginning in 2008 from a Mayor’s Trade Council report, Winnipeg’s business community took the recommendations to then-Premier Gary Doer who asked business, government and labour leaders to look at how to make the vision a reality. They created a non-share capital corporation responsible for attracting business investment.
The corporation is not a land developer but merely a “facilitator,” said Gray. “We have no intention of getting into the development game but to connect the dots to private developers, land owner and investors.”
It’s still in its early days and there are still major issues to be ironed out in developing a master development plan since most of the designated CentrePort lands are unserviced. What kind of corporate buy-in there is and what the incoming and backhaul intermodal opportunities there are will be revealed after CentrePort’s anticipated business plan is released in June.
Gray said with greater internal trade and labour mobility in Canada, there will be more opportunities for companies to bid on infrastructure projects as it goes to tender.
Ultimately, CentrePort’s ripple effect should spill over Manitoba’s borders and reach into northwestern Ontario.
One Thunder Bay firm, TBT Engineering, has already set up a branch office in Winnipeg’s north end to take advantage of any infrastructure work associated with CentrePort.
Two of CentrePort’s board members, Winnipeg International Airport CEO Barry Remple and airport chairman Arthur Mauro, the new chancellor of Lakehead University, have talked up the project to business leaders in Thunder Bay.
Steve Demmings, CEO of the Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission, said Thunder Bay has to be aware of emerging new supply chains, trading networks to supply India and China with resource commodities.
“This is an opportunity for us to be all we can be with this potential new trading relationship.”
Demmings said what is notable in the provincial enabling legislation is the mention that Winnipeg is considered the eastern terminus for CentrePort.
“It’s not just Winnipeg, but a broader supply chain gateway of port, rail and highway systems.”
He said local companies are already realizing some success driven by growth in Saskatchewan and Manitoba through its 40-member Thunder Bay Metal Fabricators Association.
Demmings, who was involved 15 years ago on the ill-fated Winport initiative, a similar intermodal concept driven by Winnipeg trucking magnate Hubert Kleysen, wants to see the business plan and how critical issues of freight backhaul and the establishment of the free trade zone will be addressed.
“Without it, it’s 20,000 acres and just another industrial park.”
Rob Beynon, a global supply chain expert with InterVISTAS Consulting in Vancouver, said CentrePort is trying to take advantage of the “big picture in international trends” in shipping resources to Asia and get manufactured products in return.
“Is there an opportunity? Yes. How much can any one city get? That’s the question.”
Beynon said the whole logistics industry is much bigger than when the Winport initiative was first floated. Because of containerization, freight-forwarders and third-party logistics providers like Fedex and UPS, there is more money to be made in handling and managing freight as opposed to just moving it.
He said U.S. air cargo gateway projects involving big economies in jurisdictions with low red tape and taxes have worked well, namely Ross Perot’s Alliance Texas, a fastgrowing industrial airport in Fort Worth, and JetPlex Industrial Park in Huntsville, Ala.
Beynon said CentrePort’s success or failure depends on the world's economic recovery and working closely with the industry partners, particularly rail carriers and container lines who determine where freight is routed.
