Niagara South MP Fred Davies is calling on the Carney government to fully fund the rehabilitation of Wharf 18 in Port Colborne, which Davies says is long overdue.
Late last week, Davies sent a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney and Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon calling on the government to act.
Wharf 18 sits at the southern boundary of the Welland Canal, at the gateway between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic. Wharf 18 is a federally owned asset but has been out of service for nearly 20 years. It is managed by the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation on behalf of Transport Canada.
“This is a federal asset that the federal government has let rot for two decades,” said Davies. “Ottawa built this wharf, Ottawa owns it, and Ottawa is the only one that can fix it.”
“Every year it sits broken is a year of jobs, freight, and economic opportunity this country simply walks away from,” Davies added.
While the federal government announced $22.7 million toward rehabilitating Wharves 18-1, 18-2, and 18-3 back in 2023, the funding was conditional on matching contributions from the Seaway, Transport Canada or a private sector partner. With no matching funds forthcoming, no action has been taken.
“I believe this announcement was mostly smoke and mirrors,” said Davies. “Transport Canada and the St. Lawrence Seaway have no plans to allocate funds to the project, which was confirmed when I questioned a St. Lawrence Seaway official at Transport Committee in Ottawa. The funding was conditional from the start and is at risk of being lost altogether.”
“You cannot keep asking the private sector to pay to rehabilitate a dock it can never own,” Davies added. “That is an impossible business model, and it will keep failing until Ottawa treats this the same way it treats a federal bridge or a federal highway, something the government pays to maintain because the government owns it.”
According to Davies, there is a strong economic case for rehabilitating the wharf. Once fully rehabilitated, it could add roughly one million metric tonnes of freight capacity to the Niagara trade corridor each year, allowing for significant commercial and industrial expansion, bringing new jobs and economic growth.
Davies also pointed to the issue of economic sovereignty amidst the ongoing trade war with the United States, noting that every tonne of goods shipped within Canada is a tonne that doesn’t go across the U.S. border and won’t get tariffed.
Jay Goldberg is the Canadian Affairs Manager at the Consumer Choice Center. He previously served as the Ontario Director at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and a policy fellow at the Munk School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. Jay holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto.
