PRINCE RUPERT, B.C. – Attracting some 200 visitors from across North America and as far away as Europe and Asia, the grand opening Thursday of the Port of Prince Rupert’s CANXPORT logistics facility received high praise from multiple government and industry officials as well as regional First Nations leaders celebrating its potential for expanding Canadian exports to Asian markets.
“It opens up an opportunity to export more, and it gets us access to Asian markets that are different than what we’ve done traditionally,” said Kurt Slocombe, President and CEO of the Prince Rupert Port Authority in northern British Columbia.
The $750 million logistics complex – under construction for the past three years on the south end of the port’s Ridley Island – will be operated entirely by Montreal headquartered Ray-Mont Logistics, said Mr. Slocombe, who was appointed the port’s chief executive in April this year, after joining PRPA in 2019 as Vice President, Operations, Planning and Infrastructure. The CANXPORT facility is the latest in a number of bulk export operations spearheaded by the port in recent years.
Originally developed in the early 2000s, the Port of Prince Rupert’s value proposition was based on its geographical location providing shorter transport times for container shipping between other North American west coast ports and Asian markets.
Innovative transloading concept
The CANXPORT facility is based on Ray-Mont’s unique innovation that combines direct transloading of bulk commodities from rail cars into containers – “taking the warehouse out of the equation, saving money for exporters, reducing the cost to make it more competitive on a global scale, and doing a just-in-time transaction,” Stephen Paul, Chief Strategy Officer at Raymont Logistics, explained to Maritime Magazine.
Mr. Slocombe noted that currently more than 50 per cent of the Port of Prince Rupert’s containers going back to Asia are empty. “So initially, we’re just going to eat up the existing empty container fleet that’s available to us. Then secondly, it will lead to an increase in empty or import containers to supply the empty of export requirements,” he told reporters.
What started with specialty grains being containerized for export by Raymont ten years ago has now expanded from agricultural products to forestry products as well as to polyethylene pellets used in industrial manufacturing in variety of products including automotive parts.
Mr. Paul singled out Dow Chemicals for the plastic pellets manufactured in Fort Saskatchewan. “This is supporting the capex (capital expenditure) involved in the CANXPORT project,” he said.
“We are the only facility on the export side that is taking this significant amount of unit train traffic and loading it into containers. What is exciting here today is this phase one capacity is going to be near 100,000 TEUs of containers, with the growth up to 400,000 TEUs of capacity in years to come,” Mr. Paul stressed.
Speakers at the opening ceremony held outdoors on the CANXPORT site Thursday afternoon included PRPA’s Kurk Slocombe; Ray-Mont Logistics President and CEO, Charles Raymond; Canadian National Railway President and CEO, Tracy Robinson; Dow Canada President, Skya Kruithof; Metlakatla First Nation Chief Robert Nelson; British Columbia Minister of Transport and Transit, the Honourable Mike Farnsworth; and federal Minister of Transport, the Honourable Steven MacKinnon.
All speakers praised the collaborative spirit in which the multiple stakeholders involved in bringing the CANXPORT facility to fruition since Ray-Mont’s successful proof of concept in 2017. While not planned at the time, the opening of the facility received significant recognition for its timely prominence in the midst of current trade tariff tensions between Canada and USA.
A quip for Trump from Minister MacKinnon…
Mr. MacKinnon’s tongue-in-cheek announcement that the Government of Canada was going to rename the Pacific Ocean to the Canada Ocean – a biting reference to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America made by U.S. President Donald Trump earlier this week – drew gales of laughter from the international audience at the ceremony.
Commented Mr. Slocombe: “Canada as a country needs to think big. We can do big things in this country.”
(Photos from PRPA)