Alberta oil, agriculture nervous as CP Rail strike looms

Alberta's oil and agriculture industries arecautiously watching the Canadian PacificRailway labour dispute asthousands of train operators and signalling workers are poised to walk off the job Tuesday evening.

About 3,000 locomotive engineers and conductors in the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, and roughly 360 signals and communications employees inthe InternationalBrotherhood of Electrical Workers, voted overwhelming against the railway's contract offers late last week.

Then the unionsformally served strike notice, with the deadlineof 10p.m. ET Tuesday now looming.

Both unions have said they are prepared to strike if further talks, facilitated by a federal mediator, fail.

It's all making rail-dependent industries nervous.

"Certainly disappointing and we're really hoping itdoesn'thappen," Kevin Bender, chairman of the Alberta Wheat Commission, said Monday.

"One week, if they go on strike and the trains don't move, that's about 400,000 tonnes of grain that will be stuck either in elevators or on farmers' yards that they can't move."

Bender, who farms near Sylvan Lake, Alta., said wheat transports were already backed up after the winter. A strike would exacerbate the problem.

"It would be quite detrimental if that happens," he said.

The oil industryis also following the dispute closely, eyeing "any further impact on the availability of rail capacity," the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said in a statement.

"Pipelines are full and rail capacity is very tight," spokesperson ElisabethBessonsaid in the statement. "Any loss of capacity will make a bad situation worse."

CP, the country's second-largest railroad, has seen strong demand recently for its transportation services. In a statement on it website, the railway said it is preparing a contingency plan in the event of a work stoppage.

Bender said the wheat commission would encourage the federal government to enact back-to-work legislation or binding arbitration, should CP Rail workers strike again.

The company's train crews have gone on strike two times in the past few years. For one of them, the federal government under then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper threatened to enact back-to-work legislation.

Teamsters spokesperson Christopher Monettesaid both sides were talking Monday and meeting with the mediator.

"I want everybody to know that we're trying hard to try to reach a negotiated settlement, to move forward without a service disruption," he said.

"But unfortunately we have no progress to report at this stage."

The union's main goal is to address issues of fatigue, workplace culture, "systematic" collective agreement violations and "intense punitive" discipline. Monette said the union's roughly 3,000 members have filed 8,000 outstanding grievances.

A strike would be "a last resort," but he said if no agreement is reached, the union will strike Tuesday.

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