Minister of Transport announces funding in British Columbia to improve rail capacity for the agriculture sector

Mar 17, 2023

SURREY, BC, - An efficient and reliable transportation system is essential to making life more affordable for Canadians and to combat the rising cost of living. The Government of Canada is committed to ensuring our supply chains grow the economy and create good, middle-class jobs for Canadians, while ensuring they are resilient and adaptive to the impacts of climate change.

Today, the Minister of Transport, the Honourable Omar Alghabra, announced an investment of up to $23 million to Global Agriculture Trans-Loading Inc., under the National Trade Corridors Fund, for a project that will expand rail capacity in Surrey, British Columbia.

With this funding, Global Agriculture Trans-Loading will make several purchases, including:

a three-track rail spur;
new container lifts;
railcar pushers;
conveyor belt systems; and
bagging equipment.

These improvements to rail infrastructure and capacity will enable Global Agriculture Trans-Loading to double their operations and help move agricultural products and grain between different modes of transportation more efficiently. By reducing delays and bottlenecks in the transfer process, Canadian agricultural products will reach global markets faster.

The Government of Canada continues to make investments to strengthen our supply chain, promote economic growth, and create more opportunities for Canadian businesses. This represents another long-term commitment to work with stakeholders on strategic infrastructure projects to address transportation bottlenecks, vulnerabilities, and congestion along Canada's trade corridors.

Source : Newswire.ca

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids