It appears the vigorous lobbying by the Chamber of Marine Commerce and Picton Terminals over the past few years for a Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway trade corridor — Highway H2O — has not been for nought.

The Federal Budget tabled November 4 includes a $5-billion Trade Diversification Corridors Fund that targets marine transportation. 

Under consideration are port expansions in Quebec, rail lines in Alberta, port and rail infrastructure on the West Coast, and “key projects in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Region.”

In a written submission to the federal government’s budget pre-consultations this August, Picton Terminals claimed its port on Picton Bay is “a critical trade and transportation hub in the St. Lawrence & Great Lakes region and the eastern Ontario supply chain.”

It asked the government to establish “a marine transportation corridor through the Great Lakes for increased container and bulk cargo capacity.” Picton Terminals in particular could “support the Canadian economy by expanding its service offerings to include containerized cargo transshipments in and out of its facility in Picton Bay.”

Meanwhile, a flurry of news articles over the past few weeks have touted a Chamber of Marine Commerce study released in October called “Unlocking the Potential of the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Seaway.”

It claims investments in six Great Lakes ports can “turn the tide” on the “decline” in container shipping on the Seaway.

Of the six, five are actual shipping ports, with basics like rail links and connected highways. The Port of Quebec, Valleyfield, the Hamilton-Oshawa Port Authority, Goderich, and Windsor are all well established, high-functioning ports that are trying to figure out how to make containers a bigger part of their business. 

The vast majority of the world’s goods are shipped in containers. On this side of Canada, these arrive at three ports: Halifax, St. John, and Montreal. The idea is to relieve a serious congestion problem by introducing container services at other available ports.

The sixth port ripe for a slice of the international container action, according to the study, is our own little Picton, home to the Doornekamp family’s private receiving dock. 

Picton Terminals sees on average about seven or eight ships a year, according to logs on its website. It occasionally stores bulk cargo. It has no rail links, and no immediate highway access. Its bid to be included on the Seaway shipping map seems to rest on the fact that the Doornekamps have acquired three of their own container ships.  

The Chamber of Marine Commerce study says that turning these six Great Lakes ports into container ports, able to “receive and scan foreign containers entering Canada,” would result in $132.4 million in additional business income across Ontario and Quebec. 

When it comes to the Terminals, the study estimates container shipping on Picton Bay would add $26.4 million to the local economy.

The vast majority of St. Lawrence Seaway traffic is in bulk cargo, because containers can be shipped much more quickly via rail. Where it takes a little more than 24 hours to send a container by rail from Montreal to Chicago, it takes a week to ship it through the Great Lakes.

Further, the Seaway is closed for about three months every year. International supply chains prefer stability, regularity, and predictability.  

Last year’s total Seaway tolls for container ships were $53,000. Containers represented .2% of the total shipping traffic.

But in its lobbying document, the Terminals says, “as a deep-water port close to the GTA, Picton…is positioned to receive direct shipments to and from Europe and the United States. This would reduce reliance on over-capacity port facilities, rail networks and gridlocked highway systems to ship goods domestically and internationally.” It claims a “commercial port facility would improve traffic congestion on Ontario highways such as the 401.”

“Based on estimates for one container ship arriving weekly, Picton Terminals would eliminate up to 52,000 trucks off the road per year.”

Given that there is no rail link, or even a real highway nearby, to really take trucks off the road, all of those containers, the ones generating $26 million per year, would have to be bound, not for the GTA, but locally.

Where this sudden, and entirely unprecedented, demand for containers in PEC is going to come from is not detailed.

Container dreams are not new. The St. Lawrence Seaway was built to allow ocean-going ships carrying containers to access the Great Lakes.

But almost as soon it was completed, it was obsolete. In the decade after Queen Elizabeth opened the Seaway in 1959, economies of scale rendered most commercial container ships too large for either the available draught, never mind the locks and canals that link the lakes.

At the same time, containers could be shipped faster via rail and trucks. That is why Seaway container shipping peaked in 1979, when containers accounted for 0.4% of total shipping traffic. 

The Seaway is dominated by bulk cargo. Containers have never accounted for more than half a percentage point of total traffic.

By the 1980s, ocean-going ships stopped calling at the Great Lakes ports altogether. Regular services on the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes comes by way of Lakers, which mainly transport bulk cargo.

Picton Terminals, however, seems to be trying to position itself as another Port of Cleveland, which has been investing in container shipping for over a decade. In 2014, the Port announced a dedicated monthly container service, the Cleveland – Antwerp Express, which began to run twice monthly in 2015. It was successful because it can match the speed of rail service from northeastern ports into the midwest, which can take 4-6 days. That means the Antwerp Express can move from the Netherlands, across the Atlantic, and deep into the Midwest in 12 or 13 days.

Yet containers still only account for 3 percent of Cleveland’s shipping traffic. Of $14 million in annual revenues last year, about $400,000 come from container shipping — at a port with two rail links and three interstate highway connections.

It is the same story in Hamilton and in Oshawa. While both ports are far better located and serviced than Picton, containers only account for about 2% of total shipments.

While the Chamber of Marine Commerce study contains excellent proposals to diversify into container shipping and storage at obvious places, like Windsor, Hamilton-Oshawa, and the Port of Quebec, it’s a head scratcher what Picton is doing on the list.