The Current - Saint John port is in the middle of a major comeback

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

The Saint John container port in New Brunswick is drawing attention from all over the world. The people there are positioning the place as one answer to our tariff troubles. A growing number of companies are shipping through the port, to and from places, other than the US. Saint John is one of the most tariff-affected Canadian cities. So ,we talk about one of the success stories we found there as people there are working hard to adapt to changing times.And why some see the Port of Saint John as a gateway to the world.

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This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. You know, we love to take this program out on the road, travel to all the corners of this big, beautiful country, and bring you the stories of the people and the places that we visit. In August, we did just that, just as the U.S. trade deal was collapsing, we were in the Maritimes. And what stood out is that Canada, you kind of know this already,

but Canada is a country full of people who keep going, even when the ground beneath us feels uncertain. One of the success stories that we found is in St. John, New Brunswick. St. John is one of the most tariff-affected cities in this country, but people there are working hard to adapt to changing times. Its once booming seaport is in the middle of a major comeback. At one time I used to come down the waterfront, and except for the day or the two days,

we may have had a container ship in that week. We'd only have six to 12 people working in the terminal. And it used to just make you feel terrible. Now we come down and we have 100, 125. The St. John Container Port is drawing attention from all over the world. People there are positioning the place as one of Canada's answers to our tariff troubles. A growing number of companies are shipping through the port to and from places other than the United States. Port CEO Craig Bell Esther Brooks has a powerful pitch with its eastern location,

access to two rail lines, and massive upgrades. He says this port is now a gateway to the world. Craig and his team have been fighting for this comeback for years. What really stood out for us is that this port mattered tremendously through history. Prior to Canadian Confederation, St. John was one of the most important seaports in all of North America. So why did the geographic location make sense for so many years, but didn't really sustain itself through the post-World War II period into the 80s and 90s? Really, for us, it was all about an infrastructure play. So what does the pier look like?

Can it welcome the bigger ships? Do you have the right rail on terminal that can connect in to where the cargo is coming or going from? And are all of the infrastructure needs at the port being looked after? And the answer for us was no at the time. So the bet we made was if we can design something. that can handle bigger vessels and we get everything right on the land side, will the business that was once a main part of St. John come back, and that has happened. Before we stopped at the port, guess what else did?

Stuff you might have already used today, your breakfast, your medication, maybe even your bed, or the car you just leased, or the office coffee machine. You name it, most goods that people have in their house or wear, whether they're clothing, their shoes, have been in a container at some point. On the morning of our visit, more than 400 giant, brightly colored containers. are being offloaded from Europe. You cannot imagine how small you feel next to a ship of that size.

The crane operator, expertly plucking each bin off the boat, sitting in a booth about 14 stories in the air. I'd say the container business is really important for two reasons. And there's five big container ports in Canada, Halifax, St. John, Montreal, on the east coast, Prince Rupert in a very remote northern part of British Columbia and Vancouver, which is the largest port in Canada and the largest container port in Canada.

We do have a neighbors south of the border that's the largest economy in the world, and they consume some of our goods, but we're also selling to a lot of different countries. And for us, it's Europe, it's Latin America, the Caribbean, it's Brazil. If you want to sell your product to those countries, you need a good port to get you there. Craig went to high school overlooking this waterfront,

but like a lot of Canadians, you never really thought about the port, never even looked its way back then. Not at all. For one, I thought that the only thing a port did was welcome cruise ships and that a lot of the cargo movement, that was something that, you know, people in the past, they worked on the waterfront and did all that work. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong.

Ports play a very crucial role in people's day-to-day lives. And what I've seen in the last 15 years, for the public, it became very present during the pandemic what a port does because people saw shelves not stocked the way they normally are. And the why was because we had tremendous bottlenecks in supply chain at ports all around the world and people weren't able to get their goods in an efficient. way. So suddenly, ports became interesting to everyone. They want to get their goods back.

Their toothpaste and toilet paper matters. And I think that's heightened awareness. And now as a country in Canada with tariffs and things that have happened south of the border, people are really looking to ports for new markets and trade diversification as well. So this guy over here, he can lift up to 90,000 tons. And this second guy over here, he's rigged up for craning so we can actually use him like a crane. Not so far away, April Logue is standing in the middle of a container depot with huge machines moving these containers ready to be reloaded and then shipped off. It's kind of like a kid's dream.

April's in a suit and an orange safety vest. People didn't know before that we were here. People didn't know that Port St. John was ready for business. And so now they've done a great job of saying, hey, we're here. And not only I were here, but we're ready to do whatever kind of services need to be done. Before I started doing this too, I would be like, oh, like a truck, you'd never notice a truck going down the street or the port. And now I drive across the harbor bridge and I go a little slower and I look over, oh, there's a ship in today, whose ship is it?

How many containers are on port? We have some blueberries and potatoes. We've been picking up a lot from PEI. April is the boss of this operation. It's a company called Riptide. And she is an unlikely boss. Just a few years ago, as her husband Ronnie was getting into the shipping business and getting it off the ground, he died unexpectedly.

When I took this on, I really wanted it to work, and I just took that time to say, how am I going to, how, how do I learn this? April was then a high school vice principal, and she made a wild decision to leave the school and take over the company. Things are constantly moving. Everything's everything, and you just never know

what the new day is going to bring. And through this gated area is where we keep the containers that are ready to go out for shipments. So they're empty. This company started with four employees. In the two years that April has been in charge, she's grown into 12, and she's just bought a new machine for moving containers. That machine cost nearly a million dollars.

I have plans. I have plans. Terry Wilson says he would like to see the cargo at the port triple. He's a third-generation longshoremen on this port, now with the union that represents those who work here. I'm third. There's fourth and fifth-generation families down. here. You know, it's something to be able to go almost 100 years and be able to have a legacy that your family started roughly 100 years ago. And the members of that family, some of them are still here 100 years after. Terry started working on the port in the early 1970s before all these

containers when guys hauled their loads by hand. Our day at work would be going aboard a flower boat and 140 pound bags of flour. Now it's the people in his union operating the giant cranes that make a person feel as small as an insect. To see a ship in the port is a big change from 2016 when we had one or two ships, and they were here four hours or eight hours, and then they were gone, and then we wouldn't see anything else until they returned a week later or whatever. It was pretty tight for them. Things are looking a lot brighter these days for the St. John Port.

Later this week, we will bring you another East Coast business success story, an iconic donut factory just made a huge deal to increase their shipments across Canada and beyond. We'll tell you more about that coming up. This has been the current podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m. at all time zones. You can also listen online at cBC.ca.ca slash the current or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.