Port of Vancouver CEO vows expansion plans will come with increased reliability

The Port of Vancouver is still working out details of the gateway expansion strategy it filed with the federal government’s major projects office this summer, but port CEO Peter Xotta is already starting on his sales pitch for new customers in the business community.

With expansion plans worth potentially $10 billion, and with an aim to increase annual trade by 25 per cent over 2023 levels by 2030, Xotta brought that pitch to a full-house crowd of 700 at the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade on Tuesday.

In a speech during which he enthused about the port’s ambitions to build on two successive years of record growth, Xotta offered a promise that its plans to dramatically expand its capacity will come with increased reliability.

“This is not happening out of pure luck,” Xotta said in his remarks. “It’s happening through world-class industry partners, many of whom are in the room today, an extraordinary workforce, and businesses willing to make big bets on Canada’s future.”

Xotta, CEO of the port’s governing Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, pointed to mining giant BHP, which is spending $800 million for a new potash export terminal at Westshore Terminals on Roberts Bank to support a $20 billion mine expansion in Saskatchewan as one of the bigger recent investments.

“We have to have companies like that making bets in Canada,” Xotta said.

He added that companies such as BHP need to have the confidence that the Port of Vancouver will put the systems and processes in place to handle their cargo without disruptions.

“People have long memories,” Xotta said about past labour disputes and supply-chain disruptions that have beset the port.

So port officials are “busy trying to reset, to get back to historic levels of performance and reliability,” Xotta said.

“Some of that includes adding physical capacity so that we have flexibility,” Xotta said. “But part of it is what we talked about with respect to Bill C-39, which is labour reliability and also permitting expediency when investments are necessary.”

Xotta came to Tuesday’s Board of Trade event with a bigger spotlight on the port owing to the outsized role it is expected to play in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ambitions to double Canada’s non-U.S. exports by 2035.

Some $1 billion per day worth of trade — grain, coal, fertilizer, oil and myriad consumer products carried in containers — pass through the Port of Vancouver’s terminals now, but that is expected to increase dramatically.

His speech came just four days after Ottawa delivered the port’s Roberts Bank Terminal 2 project a momentum boost by listing the key $5.9 billion expansion as being in the national interest. That project alone, expected to come on line in the mid-2030s, is expected to increase the Port of Vancouver’s container capacity by 50 per cent.