‘It will slow everything’: Strike starts at 6 Metro Vancouver grain terminals

Picket lines went up astatine six atom terminal locations successful Metro Vancouver connected Tuesday morning.

About 600 workers person gone connected onslaught and Grain Workers Union Local 333 president Douglas Lea-Smith said the Vancouver Terminal Elevators Association needs to travel backmost to the bargaining array to negociate a deal.

The national said it provided the leader with a “comprehensive package” past week and it had nary counter-offer.

Meanwhile, Steven MacKinnon, Canada’s labour minister, said helium spoke to some the leader and the national and they person agreed to resume declaration negotiations with national mediators’ help.

“This volition person a monolithic interaction connected the Canadian economy,” Lea-Smith said.

“It volition dilatory everything. They’re claiming $35 cardinal a day. We are not looking for $35 cardinal a time and we are precise cognizant of however this impacts the farmers and we privation to get a declaration and it’s the employers who are holding up the contract.”

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Lea-Smith added that the workers “carried” the companies done COVID-19, a drought and record-high ostentation rates truthful they request to conscionable the workers’ demands.

Canadian atom farmers person said a onslaught would cripple harvest exports since astir 52 per cent of each Canadian-grown atom went to those terminals past year.

“The worth of those ports to the Canadian system is immense and that needs to beryllium recognized arsenic we proceed to spot threats to our proviso chain, beryllium it obstruction strike, larboard workers, present it’s the terminal workers,” Ian Boxell, a atom husbandman and president of the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan, told Global News.

“It conscionable seems continually we’re getting deed successful the gut with thing that astatine the extremity of the time hurts farmers’ currency travel bottommost line.”

— with files from The Canadian Press