Access to Cross Border Truck Transportation Critical to Security of Canada's Pork Sector

A Manitoba based agricultural journalist reports, when it comes to the cross-border trucking issue, the main concern of Canada's farmers is their ability to get their products moved to their customers in the United States and to access the supplies they need from the United States. Members of a convoy of truckers that travelled across Canada and their supporters have been calling on the federal government to end its vaccine mandate for cross border truckers.

Harry Siemens, a Winkler based agricultural journalist and podcaster who has been following the convey, says the main concern of Canadian farmers through all of this is their ability to move their products south into the United States and to receive the supplies they need from the United States.

Clip-Harry Siemens-Manitoba Agricultural Journalist:

Pigs are waiting to go to the U.S. where they utilize the weanlings, isoweans or feeder pigs. A lot of those pigs aren't going south. Secondly there's feed on the other side of the border that wants to come across the border and even there, I'm talking to various individuals, the feed isn't coming in and right now we have a feed shortage because we had a 40 percent drop in the crop across western Canada.

Whether it's a cattle producer in Alberta, whether it's a cattle producer here in Manitoba or Saskatchewan or the hog producer, we need to get the feed. I think if you walk into a store and I was just in a Superstore yesterday and it looked to me like, as my daughter pointed, they just don't have it.

It looks picked over and I think that's the kind of thing we're seeing. There are all kinds of things that are going on because of this. Number one, there's a shortage, number two the costs of transportation are going up and number three the cost of the product itself will also keep going up.