The delivery of goods ranging from oil to car parts to yogurt are at risk of serious delays as railway blockades and growing protests against the construction of a pipeline in Wet’suwet’en territory in northern B.C. approach the one-week mark.

Members of the Wet’suwet’en are fighting the construction of a $6.6-billion pipeline through their land, and the recent standoff with RCMP forced the tension between energy projects and some Indigenous groups back into the national spotlight.

But the companies who depend on the more than 40,000 kilometres of rail criss-crossing the country to get goods to market say they’re getting caught in the crossfire, after Canadian National Rail said Tuesday it had no choice but to shut down “significant” parts of its network if blockades remained.

“Every day we hear more and more from companies that either can’t get their parts or ingredients or components to market, or can’t get their products out. It’s beginning to pile up,” said Dennis Darby, the president of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, whose members typically load about 4,500 rail cars a day.

Cenovus Chief Executive Officer Alexander Pourbaix said Wednesday that the blockage presented a “significant risk” to both his business and the Canadian economy as a whole. The company shipped about 120,000 barrels of crude a day via rail in January, executives said on a call.

In an email, Natacha Gouveia, a spokesperson for food company Danone, said they had yogurt sitting on freight trains and expected the blockades to impact their ability to deliver to western Canada.

Blockades near Belleville, Ont., and between Prince George and Prince Rupert in B.C., have already disrupted passenger traffic as well as shipments of grain, propane, lumber and consumer goods, according to CN.

“It’s not just passenger trains that are impacted by these blockades, it’s all Canadian supply-chains,” CN Rail CEO Jean-Jacques Ruest said in the statement.

The blockade had also halted crude-by-rail shipments to New Brunswick, where the Irving Oil Corp. refinery, Canada’s biggest, is located.

Darby of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters estimates that about half of all rail traffic in Canada is manufactured goods, destined to eventually end up in the hands of consumers. While shoppers won’t have seen the effects of the blockades yet, he says, that may change if the blockades persist.

“In today’s modern industrial economy, there aren’t as many big warehouses of stuff as people tend to think,” he said. “It’s kind of in, out and sell.”

In terms of the impact on the economy as a whole, one of the most recent examples of the ripple effects of shuttering railways was the CN strike last November, which prompted the temporary closure of Canada’s largest potash mine and some short-term layoffs at CN itself.

At the time, economists estimated the strike — which lasted a little over a week — cost the Canadian economy about $1 billion.

But more economically damaging in the long run, according to David Gillen, director of the Centre for Transportation Studies at UBC’s Sauder School of Business, is the dent this will leave in Canada’s reputation. He argues that companies may be less inclined to ship by rail if they can’t be sure their goods are going to get to their destination.

Protests are particularly challenging, he adds, because unlike other interruptions of train travel, they’re hard to predict.

“It creates a lot of uncertainty as to whether there is reliability,” he said. “I think that if (the government) doesn’t nip this in the bud there’s going to be some significant issues for Canada.”

The intensifying protests are “of concern,” said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who added that his administration will be engaging with ministers to look at next possible steps. “We recognize the important democratic right, and we will always defend it, of peaceful protest,” Trudeau said to reporters in Dakar, Senegal. “We are also a country with a rule of law, and we need to make sure those laws are respected.”

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In a separate statement issued Wednesday, Transport Minister Marc Garneau said “there is time for all parties to engage in open and respectful dialogue to ensure this situation is resolved peacefully, and we strongly urge these parties to do so.”

With files from The Canadian Press and Bloomberg

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