It is unclear in this pre-conception stage whether the projected Port of Nootka - to be located in pristine moose pasture in the remote Canadian wilderness - would handle everything that Vancouver does, the port it is supposed to replace.

That is, containers as well as dry and liquid bulk cargo. To which we must undoubtedly add liquefied natural gas (LNG) as it is on its way to be one of the only marine fuels one is allowed to burn if environmentalists have their way, which at this point, seems likely.

To realise the Port of Nootka, one must build a railway, off the trans-Canada line from Lillooet in British Columbia interior before slaloming west through the numerous Coast Mountains. If a more direct route were desired, one sees many tunnels boring through mountains and trestle bridges soaring over valleys in between, something like the 750-mile China Railways line between Wuhan and Gaungzhou.

Then comes island hopping bridges to get to the one-mile Discovery Passage crossing to Campbell River on the east coast of Vancouver Island, only to continue westward following the Gold River and Route 28 as far as it goes to the west coast of Vancouver Island to face the open sea. This would include a pipeline.

And for what? This proposal calls for the shutdown Canada's largest port to mitigate Vancouver's air quality. Not by any measure I can find a Google ranking that rates Vancouver as having the world's worst air quality.  One ranks finds Vancouver ranked 10th behind Dubai, Lahore, Hanoi, Riyadh, Sao Paulo, Karachi, Kuwait City, Jakarta and Santiago. Another ranks the worst 10 as Urumqi, China; Xinxiang, China; Manama, Bahrain; Xuchang, China; Pokhara, Nepal; Xi'an, China; Dushanbe, Tajikstan and Anyang, China.

Looking on the bright side of the port proposal, one concedes that once completed, the new port might break the strength of the unions that control North American waterfronts, which give them the power to choke off national economies at will.

There is very little reason that others working from homes faraway - in different time zones - could not operate a gantry cranes in Vancouver 24/7 with no need for gate congestion or days off and vacations. Truckers need not wait for hours unpaid - because they only get paid for delivery, and not for waiting for pick up. So moving the port to Nootka's Nowhere Land would suit such a development in which automation could be given full rein.

Also, the US west coast - unionised as it is and saddled with California screaming environmentalists - is being increasingly avoided by shipping lines, who no longer see it as the sole transpacific gateway to America. Certainly not since the Panama Canal was widened in 2016 to transit 13,000-TEU ships when before, it could only accommodate 4,500-TEUers.

Because of the Covid crisis, shippers and carriers shipped as much as they could when they could because they never knew when bureaucrats would close the ports and factories they needed to survive.

Even if the bureaucrats manage to keep Covid crisis ball on the hop, congestion will ease because of the recession and a lack of consumer spending. But what commends the Nootka scheme is that 95 per cent of Vancouver port throughput goes to Canadian destinations over trouble-free rail lines. Doubly so for the smooth as silk run to and from the Port of Prince Rupert. The rail line was useless when it was built before World War I, but CN found a use for it when it bought those short rail line roads around Chicago and took the plunge down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Now the Prince Rupert line syphons off a nice slice of Asia-US cargo that would otherwise go through US west coast ports and delivers it to Chicago three days faster.

Most consumers live east of the Mississippi, where one finds population densities like those in western Europe. It's where most cargo wants to go. Fifteen years ago the best way to get cargo east from LA-Long Beach, was to use a truck or a train, an expensive proposition. But if one kept cargo on the water, via Panama, and docked at any number of Gulf and east coast ports, a taxi ride to the greatest consumer hinterland in the world, the cost savings were enormous. This was soon to be augmented by US-bound cargo via Suez from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and east and southern Africa.

In short, the US west coast's role as an entrepot to America was being whittled away, relegated to being the gateway to the west coast alone, plus Nevada and Arizona. Texas was now better served through Houston. It was said - and rightly so - that LA-Long Beach volumes achieved record highs throughout this period. But what this ignored were the losses suffered in northern ports of Oakland, Portland and Seattle-Tacoma.

But these alternate Panama and Suez routes suit the US, not Canada. Apart from Vancouver and less so Calgary and even more less so, Edmonton, consumers are pretty thin on the ground in the big sky country of the Canadian prairies. There is a decent consumer cluster in Winnipeg, but then comes another 1,000 miles of moose pasture, bears and black flies before you get to the heartland of Canadian civilisation the 700-mile consumer-rich stretch from Quebec City to Detroit, with Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa in between.

What's more these affluent hinterlands are made doubly so by the proximity of Buffalo and Rochester, New York; Detroit, Michigan; Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio and Milwaukee, Wisconsin on the other side of the Great Lakes. And with South Bend, Indiana and Chicago, Illinois only a short truck ride from Detroit you might throw in the Windy City too.

But these areas are only accessible 24/7 by rail and road. Cheap sea freight is denied for four to five months because winter closes the St Lawrence Seaway. What's more, the ships must be small, 3,500-4,000 TEU, nothing like the 10,000-TEUers seen on the coasts.

The key point is that Canada's consumer hinterlands can be best reached from Asia via British Columbia. The northern BC port of Prince Rupert is preferred by ships from northern China, those leaving Tianjin, near Beijing, and those from Bohai Rim ports like Dalian. Ditto for ships leaving Korea and Japan. Even Shanghai and Yangtze River ports are hardly inconvenienced by their location farther south. And with that rail line feeding into Chicago, they are best served by Prince Rupert.

Neither the Panama nor Suez can service this Canadian trade. First, it's a long way south to get into Panama before one heads north to access Gulf and east coast ports. Getting goods to New York and Boston is about as far as these ships can go economically. That's because getting to that consumer rich Canadian hinterland described above by sea, they must first sail 800 miles north before getting to the St Lawrence River for another 1,000-mile voyage southwest to Montreal where the first paying customers live in substantial numbers. So it's not worth it when one's ship can only call in the summer navigation season and be no bigger than 4,000-TEU.

Turning to oil, one is shocked to learn how much oil Canada exports to China: 3.9 million tonnes in 2021, compared to a paltry one million tonnes to other Asia Pacific, the next largest customer category. Then comes 700,000 tonnes sold to South and Central America and 600,000 tonnes that go to India.

With all the talk of decoupling from China, one can see that high volume becoming a problematic diplomatic liability, especially when the existence of a nearly 400 per cent gap between China and the next Canadian oil customer's sales volume is more widely appreciated. The impact this might have on the pipeline prospects is uncertain.

Separately, bunker burn has become massively political of late, and the UN's International Maritime Organisation (IMO) is calling the shots and in the greenies camp, as are the major corporate players. The bureaucratic carbon craze is changing what fuel ships can burn, or the way they can burn it. Scrubbers have been one solution, though often in the hope that this foolishness will go away. Such hopes are not likely to be fulfilled unless there is a massive electoral defeat of the progressive left, now headed by what might be called the Elders of Davos.

Automated ships and trucks may become a reality in the next decade. One thing is certain: Shipping has changed more in the last 10 years than it has in the previous 50. We are all in a state of shock. With judicial candidates unable to define what a woman is at congressional hearings, with tenured professors driven from their posts for saying men and women are different, with counterintuitive notions being backed by the media and the bureaucracy in saying that it is racism to discriminate against one race, but virtuous to discriminate against another, perhaps it is time to form squares, draw the wagons in a circle.