Buttigieg, Canadian officers unveil new research displaying significance of Nice Lakes transport

Buttigieg, a former South Bend, Ind., mayor who now lives in Traverse Metropolis, mentioned rising up within the Nice Lakes area helped him perceive the vitality of the waterways to America’s financial operate.

“I’m very a lot a creature of the Nice Lakes,” Buttigieg mentioned. “I grew up in northern Indiana. I labored in Chicago, married a Michigander who comes from Higher Peninsula inventory and went to high school in Wisconsin, and we now reside within the northern Decrease Peninsula of Michigan. So I do know full properly how a lot the Nice Lakes area powers North America.”

The research, performed by the financial transport agency Martin Associates, reported that cargo moved on the Nice Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway System in 2022 totaled 135.7 million metric tons valued at U.S. $26.1 billion, supporting 241,286 U.S. and Canadian jobs and producing $36 billion in financial exercise. 

Buttigieg mentioned that these metrics of a profitable maritime transport business within the Nice Lakes have an effect that extends far past the area itself. 

“If the Nice Lakes area have been to be its personal economic system it could be the third largest on the earth, behind solely China and the USA itself,” Buttigieg mentioned. “And for those who reside or work within the Nice Lakes area, you already know the way very important this area is to our economic system. However even for those who reside nowhere close to the Nice Lakes, as far-off as Texas or California or Florida, what we’re discussing as we speak has an excessive amount of relevance to your on a regular basis life.” 

The Nice Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway system’s use as a transport route dates again over 200 years to when fur merchants and indigenous tribes used the waterways as their most important avenue of transporting items. In 2023, it’s characterised by 110 ports in eight U.S. states and two Canadian provinces, which oversee the transport of products for agriculture, manufacturing and on a regular basis use. 

“When folks throughout America are going looking for groceries, filling up their automobile or selecting up a package deal on their doorstep at house, there’s an excellent probability that these are merchandise which have moved alongside the Nice Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway,” Buttigieg mentioned.

The system, which begins in Duluth, Minn., on Lake Superior’s westernmost finish and stretches past Montreal to the Atlantic Ocean, pays roughly $17.8 billion in wages to its employees, in line with the research. 

The impression of a binational transport route just like the seaway system has tethered the U.S. and Canada in what Alghabra described as a mutually useful relationship that allowed each nations to innovate by way of the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the next financial restoration. 

“No two nations rely extra on one another for his or her mutual prosperity and safety than Canada and the US,” Alghabra mentioned. “The financial significance of the Nice Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway system to each our nations can’t be overstated.”

Whereas the research’s emphasis is on the financial impacts of the seaway system, Buttigieg and Alghabra mentioned that prioritizing transport over water can have constructive environmental outcomes, as properly.