Canada's Infrastructure Trade Barriers

Episode: 0281
Why Canada can't compete on an internal level!

        Are we stuck in the past? Canada’s infrastructure is lagging behind, and it’s time to face the facts!   In the latest episode of AutoLooks, we dive into the pressing need for updated transportation systems that can facilitate internal trade across provinces. Let’s break down those barriers and connect our nation! 

​      Once again, Canada is embroiled in a standoff with the American president. Yeah, we're standing here essentially telling them we don't need you to keep us alive. We don't need your market to keep our manufacturing and our economy going. We can live without you. But to do that, Canada doesn't just need a new big trading partner, as we've seen in the past week, signing deals with India, China, hell even getting backing from the Australian Prime Minister for what we stated in Davos. No, Canada needs to trade amongst itself just as badly as it needs to trade outside of its borders. But within our borders, we have an even bigger problem. Transportation. Our infrastructure dates all the way back to the 1960s, as that being the last time you made major upgrades across the entire board to all of our infrastructure. Rails are outdated. Highways are outdated. If we want to better compete in a global economy and we want to show that we are one unified nation that demands and can handle moving from the Americas over to Asian marketplaces, we need to prove that we could trade amongst ourselves first and foremost. Canada needs to take down its walls on inter-provincial trade barriers. And like we said, infrastructure is one of the biggest parts of that. So today, AutoLooks is going to be taking look at the infrastructure deficits and issues that hamper our internal trade barriers.
 
      Welcome back to the AutoLooks Podcast. am your host as always, the doctor to the automotive industry, Mr. Everett Jay coming to you from our host website at AutoLooks.net. If you haven't been there, stop by, check it out, read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings, go to the corporate links website page, big or small. have them all car companies from around the globe, all available in one direct location. That is the AutoLooks.net website. The AutoLooks Podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and is distributed by Podbean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at [email protected].

       ​So, like we said in the intro, Canada's internal trade barriers. Hell, I've known about them for decades. Living in Northern Ontario, yes, 85 % of the entire province of Ontario is what is considered Northern Ontario. And when you cross Canada from coast to coast, it is the longest portion you travel, stretching from the Manitoba border all the way to Montreal. Highway 17 is...the Trans-Canada Highway and it is where we crisscross our nation for trade. So, what's the problem? Well, the problem is that the last section of Highway 17 was opened in 1964. And since that date between the Manitoba border and Arnprior, Ontario, very minor infrastructure upgrades have been made. And for that, we now have a massive bottleneck.
 
      The country Canada has dealt with the Americas for years. The United States market has been our biggest trading partner. We have shipped upwards of 85 % of our trade in products to the United States market for decades. So, every major infrastructure project that we've made for rail, for highways, ports is all set up to directly flow into the American marketplace. But now with tons of tariffs looming and this standoff for the Arctic.
 
     Canada has its back up against the wall. And now we're starting to realize that we need to start trading internally to make it easier to get stuff from coast to coast, to help our people out, but to also open up bigger markets globally. And for that, what do we need first? Well, the United States marketplace set out a brand-new idea. Let's create a national highway pact. That being the interstate system.  

​       A fully national highway system that every state has to abide by. They essentially stated we need to move product from coast to coast easily. And we know that trains handle most of the freight already, but trains at this point in time can only handle so much. And with the introduction of the automobile, we're going to be moving more things inner city by vehicles than we are by trains. And as people move further and further out, city cores. We're going to have to start transporting things on roadways. Understanding this and understanding how at the New York World Fair, a brand-new highway system was showcased to the global market. And with that, the American government put forth their national highway system. They set a date and they stated that we needed to create a national flowing highway system.
 
        Two lane highways that we already had helped. In some areas that didn't have great population, we had them and they worked because we didn't have the traffic to warrant it. But the government stated the fact that we needed to get things across from coast to coast. We get it. There's not a lot of population base in the state of Nevada at this point in time. You to remember it's 1930s and into the 40s. Vegas isn't as big as it is. So why do we need this big free flowing highway? Well, if we want to create goods in Los Angeles and ship them to New York quickly,
 
       We would have to put it on a plane, which costs way more than shipping it via train. But if we ship it via train, it still has to get to the center of our country, mostly St. Louis and change rail systems. It's to go from point A to point B before it can even go towards point C. We need to move products quickly and on a highway system. Vehicles can move more freely than trains. Trains are regulated by the rail system that they are on only.
 
       The only thing freer than a vehicle are airplanes. Now airplanes can only go where there's airports, unless you're looking at helicopters, roadways, vehicles can handle dirt, vehicles can go off road. They can handle anything, but to move this massive transport system from Los Angeles to New York, we need an integrated highway system. They needed bilateral trade and needed to break down the barriers to move products crisscrossing the country. Well.
 
       America did that and we all know about the great interstate system in the American marketplace. It's essentially what blew up their market during the 1950s. Now at that point in time, Canada was getting into it. And if you didn't know this first opened, limited access highway in all of North America is actually in Canada. Go back and take a little bit of the history of it. The Queen Elizabeth way or QEW as it's called going from Niagara Falls all the way to the city of Toronto was the first limited access freeway ever opened and constructed in North America. And it was built for the King and Queen as the Queen Elizabeth way, right? It was built for them. We opened the first, we were there first, but Southern Ontario at this point in time was the biggest and most populous area of the entire country of Canada.

​        Northern Ontario is very sparsely populated and didn't even have enough roads to connect it. We were connected coast to coast, but only by rails, not by roadways. Our roadway system, crisscrossing our nation, really wouldn't be completed until the 30s with Highway 11 opening it up. But in all reality, it wasn't until 1964 that the Trans-Canada Highway, crisscrossing our country from coast to coast to coast, opened up. And essentially it didn't go to all three coasts because it only went to the end of the Fraser River. It didn't hit the Arctic coast.
 
       That actually didn't open up until just over a decade ago when they finally made their way all the way up to Tuktoyaktuk. So, you have to think about that. We finally opened in 1964 coast to coast, but our third coast wasn't even opened up until the 2000s, essentially the teen years. 50 years later, our government didn't realize that it needed roads to transport things. We relied on flying stuff in. And right now, we want to open up this great area in far North Ontario called the Ring of Fire. It's full of minerals. has billions upon billions in mineral wealth. But the reason why we spent the past 20 years fighting to even get up
 
      We don't have anything built up there. It's because our government has been dragging its feet on building infrastructure into this point. We haven't built roads or rails into these places. We don't have the infrastructure. We never built it. We never connected every single one of these native communities that exists up there by roadways in the 50s and 60s. They've been completely cut off from the rest of the country. Hell, a few of them only up until about a year or two ago were still running on diesel power and weren't connected to our power line system.
 
         So, for us to try and develop this, we have to build brand new roads again. We have to take a look at how we're going to move this stuff considering the fact that we're over 60 years behind on expanding our national highway system to free trade barriers across our country. As of today, you can travel from just west of Arnprior, Ontario, all the way to the East Coast, anywhere, on a limited access freeway. From the Manitoba border to just on the other side of the BC border on Highway 1, you can travel on limited access and act grade four lane highways, hell, even BC’s highway one, their Trans-Canada Highway from Kamloops to the Alberta border is still spotty at best for four lane and it's not even four lane highways. It's four lane roadways, slower speeds and not built to handle the vehicles of today or growing into tomorrow. Our infrastructure is not there. Now all provinces want to trade amongst each other. Alberta wants to get more of its crude oil to both the West Coast and the East Coast. And for that we can build pipelines.
 
       But when you get to the east coast, you have to go through Ontario. Quebec doesn't want it to come through their province. No. Okay, well we can move to a port facility on the Hudson Bay. Well, there's only one port facility in the Hudson Bay. That's in Churchill, Manitoba. Expansion of that national port system needs to happen. A port in the Arctic needs to happen. A port in James Bay in Northern Ontario, just north of Moosonee needs to happen. To move more freight to global marketplaces as the Arctic frees up, we need more ports in Arctic areas. We've been functioning ports in Thunder Bay, Ontario for well over 150 years, and those ones freeze up in the wintertime, so we can still make a profit off of those. A national port system needs to happen. Vancouver, Halifax, and Montreal can't handle all of our freight.
 
      And you have to think about we're putting all of our eggs in the one basket if we're only putting them into Vancouver, Montreal, and Halifax. We need to open up more. We need Toronto to handle more. We need Thunder Bay to handle. We need to open up a new port in Moosonee. We need a new one. If you really want to put it up there, Tuktoyaktuk because there's a roadway all the way up there. We could ship stuff all the way up to the Arctic Ocean. We could ship stuff to Churchill. It has a railway, no roadway yet, but a railway all the way up there, expansion of highway system all the way up to Churchill will increase the ports capacity even more because now you can bring it in instead of bringing it and putting it on rail, bringing it to Thompson or even all the way down to Winnipeg to transload it onto a truck and then ship it out. You'd be able to ship it out right from Churchill. National freight port systems need to happen. Increase port services between coast to coast to coast. Increase overall sizes of ports, especially in Arctic regions to help bilateral trade from each province by building a national port system. In Churchill, Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and the Northwest Territories, including Nunavut, can take use of it by building one in Tuktoyaktuk, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and even BC can use it to more of an advantage. But it's not just ports. Our National Highway Pact, like I said, our Trans-Canada Highway System is way behind.

      We are over 60 years behind in expanding our highway system by not having safe highways from coast to coast to coast. We have problems. Like I said, the second you get past Arnprior Ontario on Highway 17, it's two lanes essentially until Manitoba. You have 20 kilometers outside of Sudbury. If you're taking full highway 17, you gain yourself about another 40 kilometers outside of the Sault, close to 60 kilometers outside of Thunder Bay. And when it opens in a few years, another extra 20 kilometers just before the Manitoba border between Kenora and there. Besides that, you have nearly 1500 kilometers of two-lane grade crossings, which were designed and built early sixties.
 
       Those highways have only had barriers added to them, rock pushed back, and wider shoulders added to them. Some places they've actually had corners eased out, but besides that, no major engineering feat has been put into the redesign of any of those highways. So, the addition of any 2 plus 1 highway to create safer free-flowing vehicles at a speed of in excess of 100 kilometers an hour has not been made.
 
       Four-lane limited access and four-lane at grade highways haven't been expanded. Between the area of Mattawa, Ontario, and Batchewana Bay, just north of Sault Ste. Marie, is one of the highest traffic volumes in all of Northern Ontario. There are 60 kilometers of four-lane road, 40 kilometers of at grade, four-lane crossing, and 20 kilometers of limited access throughway. Besides that, the rest of it is two lanes. It's dangerous. Highway 11 is utilized more in the wintertime to move transportation of goods, via transports across our country because Highway 17 runs along Lake Superior and the cold winds that come off of it shut down the highway constantly. Some more transports move to Highway 11, but Highway 11 gets massive snowstorms that shut it down.
 
       On a weekly basis between November and May, Highway 11 will be shut down between 12 to 28 hours every week. Take that into account. 12 to 28 hours on average every week between November, December, January, February, March, April, that's six months, half of the year, you have to have that challenge. How are you supposed to ship goods and keep prices low when they're constantly getting stuck in the highway? How are you supposed to operate a mine or a manufacturing facility in an area where you have to take into account that one day out of every week between November and May, you won't be able to ship anything? You can't. There's a reason why manufacturing in the province of Ontario barely exists. North of Barrie, Ontario is because limited access throughways and safer highways do not exist. yeah. Highway 11 has been expanded all the way to North Bay, but most of it is at grade. North Bay can pick up some of the slack. It does have alternate routes, but it's not limited access. It's at grade. So, speeds are decreased. 400 is summary isn't complete. And even when it is complete, there's no alternative route.  In some areas, you have to backtrack 20 kilometers if both lanes of the highway have been shut down, which can add an hour and a half to your trip. So how is that feasible for inter-provincial trade? It's not. On top of that, instead of shipping a truck, you could ship it on rail.

        That's everybody always says, well, get your little trucks off the road. We don't need that. We could ship everything on rail across the North. Okay. That's good. Trains tend not to get derailed and trains tend not to run behind because freight trains take precedence on all of our systems. But then if you want to move people along that they always have to get delayed because freight trains coming through our system is only a singular rail system. Sure. There's two lines that cross Northern Ontario, but there's singular rail systems with constant breakoffs. If it was a complete dual rail system where can have freight cars going east-west constantly and not have to worry about with pull-offs for passenger trains as well. You can move more freight on rail. The expansion of our national rail system to a two-way corridor would substantially increase. But as I said before, this cannot happen without having more transload facilities. They want to build a road up to the Ring of Fire to bring all of that ore down.
 
       Greenstone, Ontario to then put it on freight cars to ship it to refineries in either Sault Ste. Marie or Sudbury, Ontario. Okay, that's great. It'd be a lot easier if you just put a rail system all the way up there and you wouldn't have to do anything. The only problem is we can take stuff like that. But when you're shipping goods that are manufactured in our city, we have to ship them to Toronto to get put on boxcars to then ship them back up to Greenstone to have them taken off to go back up. Having a proper transload facility in Greenstone, Ontario, Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Sudbury, Timmins would be the number one place to put a transload facility in the northeast. It's essentially centered in the northeastern region and can easily access up to three to four hours to Sault Ste. Marie, Sudbury, and North Bay, then create one in Thunder Bay. You need transload facilities for this as well. A dual rail system with transload facilities along it would increase our rail services.
 
       Moving out to BC and across the prairies, no problem. Moving out east, they need rail systems to be brought back in. Because they developed a proper limited access through a system between the 90s and early 2000s, the East Coast of Canada doesn't rely on rail systems anymore. Sure, you can go from Halifax all the way across, but it's a singular line. That's it. By adding a dual line along that, you can put more passengers on rail systems. See, that's the other problem with our country. We don't rely...on very good rail system. If you're traveling on a via rail system between Toronto, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec, one of the most congested rail service areas in the entire country of Canada, anytime a freight train is coming through, the via rail has to move off to a side part and wait. They are 95 % guaranteed to always be late running on via rail systems along that line because it's never been expanded. The rail system hasn't been expanded. That's another big problem. 

​       But one of our biggest problems is in national freight systems. Look at central systems for trade within provinces. National warehouse locations. By having a limited access highway from coast to coast, you don't need one to the Arctic, but at least up to Whitehorse to increase the expanse of mining and minerals in those areas. You can move trade more freely, more cheaply. You can use rail to get an own longer route.
 
       You can have warehouses across our nation. You don't have to just have them in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax. You can start putting these massive warehouses in Saskatoon, Fort McMurray, Timmins, Quebec City, oh, even Labrador City. Creating a more integrated infrastructure system, we can open up those trade barriers. And by increasing provincial trade alone, we can increase our GDP by four (4%) percent by having a proper infrastructure system. We could ship wine from BC to Newfoundland. We could ship wine from New Brunswick all the way to BC. As of now, we can't. There are so many barriers and so many laws between each province that I am more likely to find wine and alcohol on my store shelves in Ontario from Italy, Portugal, Australia, hell, even Brazil than I am from provinces in my home country, from BC, New Brunswick, in Nova Scotia. Kind of odd, those are our homegrown ones. Not to say that we need to cut back on all these European ones, that would kind of piss them off and could add some more tariffs onto our stuff going to them. But opening up our borders so that those companies can ship more stuff, which means an increase in manufacturing jobs. We can create a better transportation network. We could speed up expansion of 11/17 and Highway 1 in BC to move freight more quickly. 

        More interest in expanding Route 138 from Quebec to Newfoundland along the coastline that can open up more port facilities along the St. Lawrence and decrease the time it takes to get from Quebec City to St. John's Newfoundland. Because this is right now you got to travel up the Labrador City and then you got about six to eight hours between there and Churchill Falls. And then again, another six hours between Churchill Falls and Happy Valley Goose Bay, where in between there is nothing. And I mean, nothing running up the coast. Yeah. You kind of give a little bit more to get back, but it would open up all those reserves. It opened up more travel along those routes. And if you build the highway on either a two plus one system or at least a two-lane freeway style, similar to what they've built on the East Coast, two lanes with bridges and cloverleafs. You can move trade from Newfoundland all the way into Ontario more easily.
 
      More interest and need for better ports and rail systems for Chesterfield Inlet in Nunavut and Churchill, Manitoba. Chesterfield Inlet is a big mining area in Nunavut. It was originally planned to be the capital of the new territory, but they decided to go to Iqaluit on Baffin Island. Chesterfield Inlet is on the mainland. And by building a road, or even a rail system for Churchill Manitoba all the way up to Chesterfield Inlet, let you can decrease the costs for those people and increase the viability of opening up new mines in the province of Nunavut. More interest in the Mackenzie River transportation corridor, essentially flowing through the Northern Gateway Highway that goes all the way up to Tuktoyaktuk, from there all the way down along the Mackenzie River to Highway 1 in Northwest Territories.
 
       You can open up that area. There's a lot of interest for mining, forestry, and hell even tourism in that area, but there's no infrastructure in it. Building a brand-new road on the eastern side of Lake Winnipeg can open up all those reserves and all of that area to more expanse. It's infrastructure just waiting. To better use of our own resources within our country, you can build more products and ship them out to more global marketplaces. We can have trade deals with countries like China where they want to build their products in our country.
 
        But then we stipulate that we have to use products from our country by not having these mines and easily accessibility towards those raw materials and manufactured goods that go into building their products. We're just opening up a Pandora's box of where they get to ship in all of their stuff from their country, basically making us a sales market for their product and that's it. Kind of like buying stuff from Temu is essentially just like that.  Temu is buying stuff from Chinese manufacturers and having them shipped in. It completely undercuts our own manufacturing industry. 

​        But by opening up proper infrastructure, decreasing the cost and making more viable areas for expanse, we can help create more inter-provincial trading and open up the borders of our entire country to a global conglomeration. We could better unite our country as a single nation not as a split one. We wouldn't have to worry about Alberta and Quebec trying to leave us if Alberta can ship its oil to Churchill Manitoba without having to go through decades of fights with our Canadian government, with fighting with people to get it across the Rockies to the Western seaboard. By having the infrastructure already there, we can move the stuff better. We get it, there has to be a demand and a reason to spend billions of dollars on this infrastructure, but in all reality, it's been there for decades. We've just missed the opportunity.
 
       If Canada doesn't take its opportunity now, we're going to have to sit back and wait another hundred years until all the other countries that are exhausting their resources right now start running dry and Canada becomes the last frontier for all this product. But by then you'll be able to just take everything out and ship it to another country. It gets kind of annoying when you think about it. Canada, second largest country in the world, and yet we're still not united a single nation, but a single nation of smaller nations within it. Hell, even some areas have smaller nations within them. Ontario is essentially in three, Northwestern Ontario, Northeastern Ontario, and Southern Ontario. North, we just call it Ontario. So, in all reality, an expanse of infrastructure systems across our great country can reduce our trade barriers and help grow our country better. Sending a deal with China is just one thing. Signing a deal with China for products that we already have or already have in development is another. Reducing these barriers is what we truly need. 

​         So, if you like this Podcast, like, share, comment about it on any major social feed or streaming sites that you've found the AutoLooks Podcast on. Like us, share us, comment about us, follow us, click the little like button at the bottom and share this with your friends. Keep in contact us and find out about more about how we're progressing even with the expanse of this. Right now, Northern leaders across Northern Ontario are fighting our province and our federal government to have Highway 17/11 addressed as a nation-building project to open up coast to coast. Because right now, we're the only thing impeding trade with every province. And it's not our fault.
 
       You can't blame Northern Ontario. We're the one that's essentially been given the shaft by the South ever since the 1950s. And after that, you stop by the website, read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings, go to the corporate links website page, big or small, we have them all, car companies from around the globe, all available in one direct location. That is the AutoLooks.net website. The AutoLooks Podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by Podbean.com If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at email at AutoLooks.net. So, for myself, Everett Jay, the AutoLooks.net website and Podbean.com, strap yourself in for this one fun wild ride. The Canadian infrastructure is going to take you on.
 
Everett J.
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