CPKC Update

May 07, 2024

The Teamsters Canada Rail Conference announced the results of its strike vote this week, with 98 percent of members voting in favor of a strike mandate.

Negotiations have been taking place this week with CPKC for its Train and Engine, and Rail Traffic Controllers

In a statement on the CPKC website they emphasize that they don't want to see a work stoppage and remain focused on reaching a balanced and responsible agreement through the collective bargaining process.

While discussions continue at the bargaining table, grain movement has been strong for this time of the year.

Elizabeth Hucker, CPKC's Assistant Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Bulk, says normally during the shoulder season they'd start to see a decline for demand in rail services for grain as farmers head to the field.

"Over the last month, we've seen strong grain shipments for this time of year. Actually, in the week that began on April 21st, we moved approximately 525,000 metric tonnes to markets like Vancouver, Thunder Bay, the U.S. and other Eastern Canadian destinations."

She says they've also seen some strong fertilizer shipments into Western Canada to support the seeding efforts.

To hear Glenda-Lee's conversation with CPKC's Assistant Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Bulk Elizabeth Hucker click on the link below.

Source : Pembinavalley online

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids