By IAN ROSS
On a blustery November and December day in the past, Gerry Dawson would be reachable only by radio.
Not so this year for the president of Thunder Bay Tug Services.
This fall, there’s no locomotives shunting, ships’ hatch covers slamming or water being churned up by massive propellers. The towering pallisades of grain elevators on Thunder Bay’s waterfront are fast becoming a paint-peeling relic of what once was.
“Welcome to what’s here, there ain’t much left.” says the 35-year career tug captain.
“This should be our busy time. We should be going 20-hours a day. Normally this time of year, I’m lucky if I get home some days.”
Consolidation in the grain elevator business and increased competition has siphoned off cargoes to other North American ports, leaving Thunder Bay with 10 working elevators and two possible closures next year.
Few know how many jobs will be lost.
At the end of October, Thunder Bay has moved 6.6 million tonnes of grain, coal, potash, bulk and general cargoes on 331 vessel trips.
It’s far removed from the 17.6 million tonnes recorded in 1983, the highest total in the last 50 years.
In the heydays of the 1950s and 60s, Thunder Bay harbour was an autumn frenzy of activity with ‘lakers’ and ‘Salties’ nudging into berths at one of 27 grain elevators. Shippers were anxious to load Prairie grain and get it out through the Seaway before winter freeze-up.
“This time of year, we should have five or six ships sitting out at anchor waiting to load. And I think there’s only one in there loading there today,” says Dawson.
It’s tough to see for Dawson. He wants his son, who earned his 60-ton captain’s certificate last year, to eventually take over the family business.
“I’m looking for a third generation, but I don’t know what’s going to be here for him.”
Dawson grew up in the working part of Thunder Bay’s waterfront, receiving his captain’s papers at 19.
“I’ve been around here since I was born,” says Dawson remembering his first trip at age six aboard one of his father’s tugs taking supplies up to the lighthouse keepers on the Slate Islands.
His parents ran a floating store ‘bum boat’ in the 1950s that supplied ships in the harbour with laundry service, tobacco and other goods when crews couldn’t get ashore.
The family bought their first tug in 1957 and when the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, they got into the linesman business catching ropes to tie up foreign ships and later expanded into commercial diving.
The bulk of Dawson’s business is ship-assist work, environmental clean-up and spill containment. Occasionally his two flat-deck barges move material around the harbour, do dredging work and retrieve the odd rail car that spills off the end of an elevator.
“There’s two tug companies in town and it’s a struggle to keep two going. I don’t know how long before one of us is gone.”
He knows how to revive the historic grain port: “Quit giving money to Churchill.”
That’s a hard sell in Ottawa. Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited the Manitoba port in October promoting the ‘Arctic bridge’ to Russia and topping off the feds share of a combined $68 million government and corporate package to improve the port and the railway up to it.
“A Denver company (OmniTRAX) owns the elevator and we’re just subsidizing the Americans,” says Dawson.
For the slew of ice breaking and government marine fees he pays, Dawson chafes at what little service he gets in return.
Buoys frequently float out of line and burnt out range lights take four months to repair. “Little things like that just drive me nuts.
“We’ve had to argue with the coast guard about getting an icebreaker up here. They’re treating us like secondary port.”
When elevators close, railway lines are pulled up and, aside from the modern Canadian coast guard building, there’s no apparent signs of much government investment in infrastructure anywhere.
Government subsidies to private ports like Churchill are in direct competition for grain cargoes with Thunder Bay, says local United Steelworkers of America president Herb Daniher, who calls it an “unfair advantage.”
He represents 200 elevator workers.
“It’s the same pie being spread out. It’s not new or different products, it’s just redistributing the assets.”
Waves of consolidation in Canadian grain handling has resulted in the creation of a new company, Viterra, a merger of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool and Agricore United. It leaves the new company with four operations on the waterfront, which likely will result in job redundancies.
Daniher says Viterra might direct-ship to the U.S. through their country elevator system and overseas through West Coast ports.
Although the exterior of waterfront elevators look rough, Daniher says, it’s state-of-the-art inside.
“If we have the volumes, we have most productive grain port in the world.”
On the plus side, positive changes are happening on city’s north side, where the former Port Arthur waterfront will be undergoing a massive transformation in the coming years.
The old freight piers of the 1950s were converted into Marina Park, a popular festival gathering place. But the city has bigger expansion plans for an expanded marina plus a hotel, condos, a market square and plaza development built around the historic CN passenger station.
Waterfront manager Katherine Dugmore returned from the Waterfront Expo in Lisbon, Portugal in October where she showcased the city’s master plan for the $100-120 million Prince Arthur’s Landing to reps from 70 cities all doing the same thing. “Lots of great ideas.”
Since the city rolled out the plan and development guidelines earlier this year, they’re preparing to field proposals from interested developers who’ve been calling from across North America.
“The most consistent things to have a successful waterfront is mixed use,” says Dugmore.
