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In mid-November the Justin Trudeau Liberal government announced it had hired investment bank Morgan Stanley Canada Ltd. to review whether the country should sell its 18 federally run ports. It will make a decision in the new year.

It followed a similar decision in September in which the government hired Credit Suisse AG to provide guidance on whether to privatize the country’s airports.

“Things can always be improved and we are open to that discussion,” Silvester said. “But if the problem they are looking to solve is simply how do they find some money, the problem my organization could end up being faced with is suddenly an amount of money we’ve been using to increase capacity in the gateway is now going toward servicing debt for a lot of money some entity has paid the government to take over the port.”

Silvester told reporters later he’s had discussions with some of Canada’s other port managers and they feel similarly.

“There is a degree of concern about the prospect of privatization. I am not alone in the view that the current governance model works well,” he said.

Silvester also told the board of trade audience the port can safely handle the proposed increase in oil tanker traffic from a new Kinder Morgan pipeline. He noted that he had just returned from a visit to Rotterdam, Europe’s biggest port, which is similar in size to Vancouver and which is surrounded by a similarly sized population. More than 31,000 deep-sea ship movements go annually through Rotterdam, including 8,200 tankers. By comparison, the Port of Vancouver has 3,100 ship movements, of which 100 are tankers. The Kinder Morgan expansion would increase that to 400 a year.