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Railroad says NAFTA important for transportation business, too

A transportation provider says the North American Free Trade Agreement doesn’t just help farmers and manufacturers, it’s important for them, too.  Chris Timmons with CN Railroad tells Brownfield, “For CN, 34% of our revenue is in the cross-border trade between Canada and the U.S., and a lot of that is enabled by the open and free trade enabled by NAFTA, so for us, it certainly is a concern and we hope that we will continue to have that free trade.

Timmons say they have a transcontinental rail system across Canada along with U.S. connections through the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, plus interchange agreements with Mexican railroads, so open and free trade across North America has enabled both CN and their customers to grow.  “Last year, we moved over 100-billion dollars worth of goods for our customers across the U.S.-Canada border and I think that it shows that it is a growing and very important business segment.”

If NAFTA goes away, Timmons says it would also affect CN’s ability to build and maintain its infrastructure.  “(It’s) expensive to build to build track and invest in everything we need to run the railroad and we certainly rely on the reliability of that trade to continue in order to justify making those investments.”

Timmons spoke to Brownfield at a recent gathering of pro-NAFTA organizations in Milwaukee which included the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation.