Canada Is Struggling to Get Its Goods to Market
- Backlog of wheat, canola, oil-sands bitumen and more
- It’s simple: ‘You need to be able to get it to the customer’
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Every day for more than six months, Jessica Raycraft has confronted hulking mounds of evidence of the great Canadian bottleneck. They’re stranded on her farm -- wheat, peas and canola in 300-foot-long, 10-foot-high bags, an astonishing 50,000 bushels, enough to fill 15 rail cars.
“Nobody would take it,” Raycraft said from her home near Tramping Lake in Saskatchewan. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that space finally opened up on freight trains, and then the fields were such a mess of mud from the spring melt that the bags were stuck. “We couldn’t move it.”