Taxes, Tennis, and Transportation

We have an uncompetitive federal corporate tax rate of 35 percent compared to Canada’s 15 percent. Our Roth IRA is inferior to Canada’s TFSA, as Amity Shlaes and I discussed in the Wall Street Journal. And while Serena Williams still tops rising star Eugenie Bouchard, we should be paying attention to ”What Canada Can Teach Us About Tennis.”


Now we face another competitive threat from the north. This time it’s British Columbia seaports says Bloomberg:

Container ships sailing across the northern Pacific are carrying more cargo and are setting course for British Columbia to avoid delays from a possible strike by U.S. West Coast longshoremen. Traffic in Prince Rupert soared 49 percent in July from a year earlier, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence, while volume dropped 19 percent in Seattle, its nearest major U.S. rival.


Canadian ports are gaining an advantage over their U.S. rivals amid an economic recovery that’s increasing container volumes from East Asia. While U.S. West Coast ports are mired in a labor dispute and congestion hobbles local railways, Prince Rupert is winning customers with its shorter sailing times from China and efficient infrastructure that can whisk freight to the U.S. Midwest and beyond.


“If people are using the Canadian ports now out of concern for a slowdown, and they like what they see and they like the processing times and the experience, they’ll continue to funnel some of their traffic that way,” Emma Griffith, a director at Fitch Ratings in New York.

So Canadian seaports are gaining in the short‐​term because of our self‐​inflicted wound, but they may also gain in the long‐​term because of both natural and man‐​made advantages:

[Prince Rupert] lies ice‐​free 745 kilometers (462 miles) northwest of Vancouver, is as many as 68 hours closer to Shanghai in sailing time than is Los Angeles, according to the Prince Rupert Port Authority. Including rail times, cargo transiting from Shanghai through Prince Rupert would reach Chicago two days quicker than if the ships called at Oakland or Seattle‐​Tacoma, and three quicker than if they unloaded in Los Angeles…


One of Prince Rupert’s advantages is that inbound containers can be transferred directly to trains rather than trucks that head to a distribution center, which is what happens at other West Coast ports, according to Kris Schumacher, a spokesman for the port authority. This kind of traffic, which uses different modes of transportation, is known within the industry as intermodal freight, and it’s booming for Canadian National.

Meanwhile back on the United States, it’s antibusiness‐​as‐​usual:

…there’s no indication when new contracts will be signed for workers at 29 ports from Washington state to California. About 20,000 dockworkers represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have been without a contract since early July. The union and the maritime association are negotiating over work rules, salaries and health‐​care benefits.


In 2002, the maritime association locked out U.S. West Coast port workers after contract talks broke down. The 10‐​day shutdown ended when then‐​President George W. Bush invoked the rarely used Taft‐​Hartley Act to reopen the ports. The dispute cost the U.S. economy $1 billion a day, according to the maritime association.