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Canada is not out of the woods with the recent rail strike. While attention at home has already shifted elsewhere, that is not the case with foreign customers. And this, in the longer term, will cause more damage than if the strike had persisted.

For those who buy our products and contribute two-thirds of the country’s GDP, how we ended the latest crisis has made things worse.

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There are three reasons for this, each of which is bad enough to cause concern abroad, but when taken together, raise even more serious alarm.

First, in Canada, these ongoing disruptions have become so frequent as to be seen as the rule not the exception. In the past year, the country’s largest port, the seventh largest in North America, shut down from a strike. Then, one of two national air carriers stranded thousands of passengers due to labour conflict. Then, Canada somehow let its two national rail carriers strike at the same time, threatening the entire North American rail network. Now a strike at the other national air carrier looms.

All this in the past 13 months. Who knows what comes next?

Of course, all of this follows year after year of transportation disruptions, which have caused our international customers to question our reliability as a supplier.

Clearly, this is more than a bad year. There are deeper, systemic problems.

Second, Canada’s response to this latest crisis was binding arbitration with a threat of back-to-work legislation. In essence, once again kicking the can down the road to the next potential transportation disruption, which could be a month or so out.

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If three, potentially four, major disruptions in a row do not prompt a more serious response, is there any hope that Canada will ever get its act together and start taking transportation logistics seriously?

The accumulated evidence is overwhelming that what we have been doing to manage our transportation and logistics systems isn’t working. Systemic reform, not tweaks, is needed.

This reality has not been lost on those outside of Ottawa.

Business associations and the Canada West Foundation have led a call for comprehensive reform of how we plan and manage trade and logistics. Last summer, all 13 premiers at the Council of the Federation unanimously adopted this call and, in turn, called on the federal government to join with them to implement the proposal. In response, there has been silence.

Instead, the federal government doubled down on our current way of doing business by creating a Supply Chain Management Office, another level of bureaucracy that will last as long as government attention.

Shuffling federal bureaucrats on the deck of the Titanic is not going to keep our economy afloat. It is the job of the opposition to point this out and offer solutions to government shortcomings. But rather than pick up the ball the Liberals have dropped, raising the alarm and pressing for a more serious response, the federal opposition parties have been silent.

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Fortunately, the Prairie provinces have taken the ideas for comprehensive reform and started collaborating to put into action elements of what all premiers agreed needed to be done.

And this is the third piece of context — to understand how much damage there has been.

We know that we can do better than simply applying a bandage to a broken limb. We have a plan for comprehensive reform and we’ve shown, on the Prairies, that it can be implemented in Canada. Yet, we as a country have chosen not to do so.

The silence by the federal government, the opposition and other stakeholders speaks volumes. Instead of solving the problem, we’ve replaced a “closed for business” sign on our storefront with a “not interested in business” sign.

Gary Mar is president and CEO of the Canada West Foundation and Carlo Dade is director of the Trade and Trade Infrastructure Centre at the Foundation.

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