B.C. flooding could cause local food and gas shortages, widespread supply chain woes
Global News
The severity of the impact depends on how quickly transport routes can be restored, experts say.
Catastrophic flooding in British Columbia could result in shortage of consumer goods, higher diesel and gasoline prices, and an added wrench in Canada’s manufacturing supply chains at a time when global trade is already facing record logjams tied to the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
B.C. Premier John Horgan declared a state of emergency on Wednesday, after flooding devastated the southern part of the province.
Washouts and landslides have halted railway access to the Port of Vancouver, Canada’s largest maritime hub, which handles $240 billion of trade in goods annually. Torrential rains have also cut off major transport routes between B.C.’s Lower Mainland and the province’s interior.
And the weather emergency has also prompted the temporary closure of Trans Mountain Pipeline, which carries oil from Alberta to the West Coast.
While it’s too early to estimate how the latest natural disaster might affect Canada’s GDP, “this is going to be a huge impact for all of Canada, but particularly for Western Canada,” Kent Fellows, a professor of economics at the University of Calgary told Global News.
The supply chain disruptions could result in shortages of food and consumer goods, as well as manufacturing inputs, Fellows says. A prolonged shutdown of the Trans Mountain pipeline network could lead to localized gasoline and diesel shortages in B.C., he warns.
Although the floods have already triggered hoarding and panic buying in some parts of B.C., any actual shortages would take a least a few days, if not weeks, to materialize, several experts told Global News.
Disruptions to key transport routes mean farmers in B.C.’s Fraser Valley are currently having to dump perishables like milk and eggs simply because there are no trucks transporting the products to market, says Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University.
