Economic Impact Study of Major Marine Initiatives

This study was prepared for the department of Fisheries and Oceans by Hickling Corporation in association with Booz*Allen & Hamilton Inc.

The objectives were to:

• Assess the global impacts of the federal marine reform initiatives and
• Evaluate the effects of the fees for marine navigation and icebreaking services.

More specifically, the study examined the following:

• The impacts of the marine reform initiatives on the commercial shipping industry and other economic sectors of the Canadian economy;
• The impacts of the marine initiatives on critical traffic flows;
• The potential for changes in shipment routings within Canada as a consequence of the marine initiatives;
• The potential for modal shifts as a consequence of the marine initiatives;
• The effect of the initiatives on public services; and
• The overall impact on the Canadian economy including business dislocations, location shifts, employment, and the net revenue impact on the government due to the institutional changes.

TAF Consultants’ Task and Contribution

TAF Consultants®’ Commodity Flows Information System: COMFIS© was used extensively to analyse the structure of commodities flowing in and out of Canadian ports to domestic and world destinations, and to apply various assumptions in order to develop a database that identify the critical traffic flows. Subsequently the latter was used with the output of other project tasks, such as the revenue and cargo assumptions from the analysis of the marine initiatives, to calculated the cost of each of the seven initiatives as well as the marine shipping cost, the inland shipping cost and the value of shipments for each flow.

We started with 55,621 records on marine shipments into or out of a Canadian port in 1994 representing a total 351.4 Mt. We then converted these records to 23,451 marine flows (international loading and unloading plus domestic loading) accounting for 299 Mt. Subsequently, by applying various assumptions, we narrowed down the database to 1,130 and 1,285 flows depending on the applied scenario. The resulting database accounted for about 88% of the 299 Mt in 1994.

The approach, methodology and the the various assumptions used to achieve the objective of this task are logically shown in the figure below.

 

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Revised: May 06, 2009