Despite a significant drop-off in cargo volume during the first half of this year, the Port of Vancouver and its officials are doubling down on a multibillion-dollar landfill expansion at Roberts Bank.
In the same Sept. 22 statement that noted an 11 per cent decrease in overall cargo traffic through the port in the first six months of 2022, Vancouver Fraser Port Authority (VFPA) president and CEO Robin Silvester reiterated that the drop is a short-term aberration that does not change the fact that the port will run out of capacity – specifically for containers – before the end of the decade.
In a separate interview, Silvester confirmed that the heavy emphasis on the Roberts Bank Terminal 2 (RBT2) project – which could cost about $3.5 billion by some estimates – was no coincidence.
“There’s no point of getting frustrated about things like a pandemic or a bad grain harvest, which are outside of our control,” Silvester said. “We focus on dealing with the long term, and the bit that’s really frustrating is where we know the problems are and what we need to do – and we aren’t making enough progress to solve them.”
The VFPA has long argued that the expansion, which would more than double container capacity in the area, is critical for a port that’s projected to run out of capacity by as early as 2030, Silvester said.
The project has been mired in regulatory processes for roughly a decade due to heavy opposition from a collection of community, environmental and business groups, but VFPA officials say they are now awaiting word on a final decision from Ottawa by the end of the year.
“We’ve had two years of experience dealing with supply chain disruptions that are out of our control,” Silvester said. “We know we are heading for a made-in-Canada supply chain problem on the container side. And we can’t deliver Terminal 2 until at least the early 2030s. So it is really the main critical issue for us.… It’s now time to make a decision to move the project forward in the interest of Canada.”
The response from project opponents, unsurprisingly, is disbelief and anger.
Roger Emsley, executive director of the Against Port Expansion group, which has been very active in opposing Terminal 2 in federal environmental review panels and other public forums, said his assessment of the Port of Vancouver’s statistics showed that low volumes in the first half of 2022 continued into August.
“Full volumes were down over 10 per cent versus year-to-date 2021 [in August], which was likely lower than prior to the pandemic,” Emsley said. “So his [Silvester’s] explanations don’t hold water.”
Emsley also challenged the VFPA’s projections that capacity will run out by 2030, noting the port authority’s website often refers to capacity being exceeded in “the early 2030s.” He added that DP World’s ongoing work to expand Prince Rupert’s Fairview Terminal would be more than enough to handle the expected increase in capacity needs along Canada’s West Coast – in an area that’s significantly less environmentally sensitive.
“It is time Silvester woke up to reality,” Emsley said. “RBT2 is never going to happen.… Numerous major environmental organizations have come out strongly against T2, and they are engaging with the federal government.”
Silvester maintains that 2022’s first-half drop in cargo traffic is closely tied to one commodity: grain. He noted that if grain exports were taken out of the equation, overall cargo numbers would have increased instead of decreased year over year.
“This [drop] is almost entirely a story about grain,” he said. “It’s about the drought last year and the very abnormally low grain harvest, and we are expecting to see a lot more grain move to the port again.… I think, when you come back to the fundamentals, we see long-term trade patterns continuing to point to growth, and we’ve got to double-down on creating capacity to provide resilience while allowing for growth.”
One of RBT2’s biggest opponents has been Global Container Terminals (GCT Canada), which operates the port’s Deltaport container facility at Roberts Bank. GCT Canada has been pushing its own smaller expansion, Deltaport Berth 4 (DP4), as a cheaper, more right-sized and more appropriate expansion than the much larger Terminal 2.
Marko Dekovic, GCT Canada’s vice-president of public affairs, said the VFPA is incorrectly trying to compare the infrastructure bottlenecks seen at Vancouver last year – largely due to the “atmospheric river” flooding that knocked out rail links to the port for about a week – to container capacity issues that the Terminal 2 expansion would address.
“We note that the Port of Vancouver’s CEO is trying to position the RBT2 project as providing necessary resiliency for Canada,” Dekovic said. “What is not clear is how: RBT2 remains connected to the exact same rail lines and inland infrastructure as the current terminals. Had it been sitting there, fully realized, it would still have been sitting idle last year during the floods, which washed rail lines out.”
VPFA has said one of the main reasons it prefers Terminal 2 to GCT’s Deltaport Berth 4 is that the new terminal would have a new operator driving down fees for vessels using the port. Dekovic noted the port authority has yet to find that new operator despite years of searching.
“The port’s own information shows RBT2 cannot be completed until 2033 at the earliest,” he said. “Other private-sector projects coming online in the Vancouver and Prince Rupert gateways and GCT’s DP4 project are better positioned to meet future capacity needs incrementally and responsibly, compared to building a new artificial island, megaproject, which requires nearly 10 years of construction.
“The ongoing effort by the port authority to penalize the success of a private sector Canadian operator under the guise of resiliency and competition is the real disservice to Canadian interests.”
Silvester, however, is not backing down.
“You have to consider where those voices [of opposition] are coming from,” he said. “Our mandate is to enable Canada’s trade in the interest of Canadians, to make sure there’s competitive capacity available for users of the port. The other voices you tend to hear are single commercial interests whose goal is to make money for its shareholders – who may be quite well-served by capacity being a bit tight and prices going up.”
