wildfires which ravaged several communities in BC a few months ago, as record-breaking temperatures caused by a so-called “heat dome” killed nearly 500 people, and led to substantial crop damage across the province. This week’s mudslides and floods have left people stranded on highways in towns like Hope, at the eastern end of both the Fraser Valley, while near the city of Abbotsford, floods have hammered key agricultural areas, leaving tens of thousands of chickens and cows at risk of drowning.
Meanwhile, containers laden with imports sit on anchored ships at the Vancouver Port, cut off from the rest of the country, disrupting already strained global supply chains. As the largest port in Canada, the fourth largest in North America, the Port of Vancouver moves around $550 million worth of cargo each day. Accordingly, staples such as food supplies, as well as goods which are to be sold ahead of Christmas are expected to be delayed in reaching store shelves in Canada.
“You’ve got product that is sitting in Vancouver harbour that can’t get out of Vancouver. It’s too late to redirect those ships to another port… and there’s nothing on the western seaboard that has capacity anyways,” Michael Graydon, CEO of Food, Health and Consumer Products of Canada, said. “There are ships sitting in the harbour that they can’t unload and now they can’t even get the product, once it’s unloaded, out of Vancouver. And that’ll probably take, I would think, about another week until the flow starts to get back to a little bit more normal.”
According to Kent Fellows, an economist with the University of Calgary School of Public Policy, the extent of the economic impact of the ongoing disaster will depend on the ability of the Canadian National Railway and the Canadian Pacific Railway to quickly repair the lines which connect Vancouver to the rest of the world. “Thinking about this from a provincial and federal perspective, this is an absolutely massive disruption and there are going to be costs in terms of both construction and lost economic activity because of the hindrance on international trade,” he said.
