'Everybody's paying the price': How the railway lockout impacted Manitobans

For most of Thursday, more than 9,000 railway workers were locked out by Canada's two largest rail companies – Canadian National Railway Co. and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd – bringing freight traffic to a halt.

Thursday afternoon, the federal labour minister stepped in, sending the issue to binding arbitration and employees back to work.

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Even with the lockout resolved, the two companies are responsible for shipping around $1 billion in goods every day, something Chuck Davidson, the president and CEO of the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce, said impacts the economy.

"In Manitoba specifically, if you're looking at agricultural products and we're in harvest mode right now, that product is not moving, effective today," said Davidson while speaking on CTV Morning Live.

"There's nowhere to store this product, there's no way to look at other options as well. You can't just throw this on a truck, that's not an option. Typically when you're looking at the loss of a train, it would make up around 300 trucks to replace that."

Davidson said the stoppage impacted a number of industries including manufacturing, critical minerals, and agriculture.

Despite a resolution, there is no word yet on when operations will resume.

Kam Blight, the president of the Association of Manitoba Municipalities, said agriculture producers in Manitoba, especially southern Manitoba, are hit hardest by what happened.

"When the ag producers are having a difficult time, the rest of the community is going to feel it, because they are not coming in to purchase additional vehicles, or equipment, or cellular phones, et cetera because their bottom line has been impacted greatly because of this," said Blight.

Even through the work stoppage will be short, Blight said producers will have to find ways to try and store their products and it will hurt their immediate cash flow as no product is moving.

Carl Stewart, a director with the Canadian Wheat Growers Association, said this work stoppage is unacceptable.

"We've had 16 major port and rail disruptions since 2010. So this is something that we've unfortunately become quite accustomed with," said Stewart. "You would think at this point we would have some sort of process to deal with these issues ahead of time, but it seems like we're waiting until it's a big issue, and everybody's paying the price."

He said these are issues that should have been dealt with months ago.

"We can't simply allow two parties, regardless of what their quarrels with each other are, to hold the entire country hostage. Not saying that their own internal negotiation shouldn't be allowed to happen, but that should have happened two, three, four months ago, not now.

Stewart said he would like to see rail and port services be deemed essential services so a work stoppage like this doesn't happen in the future.

Davidson said the stoppage could also impact Canada's reputation on the world stage.

"It's not just the short-term, it's the long-term. What does this do for Canada's reputation as a trading partner? If it becomes known that we're not reliable, we can't get our products to market, we can't bring products in, that's not a good position for a country to be in."

While the country waits for operations to resume, Stewart said for every day without rail service, it will be about a week for the agriculture industry to catch up.

- With files from CTV's Maralee Caruso, Rachel Legace, and The Canadian Press