This past weekend, a load of grain arrived at the Port of Churchill by rail, the first time such an event has taken place since the fall of 2015.
“It’s great news,” said Churchill Mayor Michael Spence in an interview with the Winnipeg Sun. “It’s great to see the grain moving again. We’re looking forward to seeing more freight moving into Churchill.”
Canada’s only deep water Arctic port had been operating for close to 90 years when then owner OmniTRAX decided to shut it down in mid-2016.
Things were made even worse in May 2017 when the Hudson Bay Railway was washed out in several places, which effectively severed Churchill from the rest of the province.
A consortium of businesses and northern communities called the Arctic Gateway Group bought the port and the railway back in September 2018, and have been working to restore both pieces of infrastructure ever since.
Now that grain shipments have finally returned to the Port of Churchill, Arctic Gateway CEO Murad Al-Katib said the facility will be targeting durum, wheat, canola and lentil and pea crops from Manitoba and Saskatchewan for shipment to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
“This is the first season again in many years, so not everything’s going to go 100 per cent smoothly but we’re prepared; we have great staff and great systems in place, so we’re pretty excited,” Al-Katib said in a phone interview with Bloomberg News.
Arctic Gateway is also looking to ship other commodities out of the port, including forestry products, mineral concentrates, fracking sand and potash.
Some Churchill residents are hoping that the resumption of operations at the port will give the local economy a much-needed shot in the arm and a return to normalcy after so much financial uncertainty.
"What's normal to us around this time of year is having full tracks of grain cars and having some ships at the harbour,” said former port work Joe Stover in an interview with CBC. “And that's something that we haven't had in about four years.”
