Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, honourable members of the committee, special guests, and fellow witnesses. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today on behalf of our MNP agri-teams, located in more than 40 offices across Canada, serving in excess of 7,000 grain producers and farm families.
My name is Stuart Person. I'm both a partner in MNP and a partner in my family's grain farm located near Canwood, Saskatchewan. In the short time I have to speak today, I want to focus on the financial impact that the crisis has had and is going to continue to have on our producers in western Canada. Some of my comments will be echoing comments made previously, but I still think...[Technical difficulty--Editor]...and I plan to expand on them a bit.
I hope you can take my message today and pass it on to the railroads and the line companies and make sure they understand the situation. This is important to us.
I'm going to focus on three specific costs that all producers affected by this will have to incur as a result of the current grain transportation crisis. The first cost is lost revenue or reduced profitability. I look at them together. Producers are seeing negative basis levels of up to $100 per tonne on some commodities, simply because the line companies are not in a position to purchase and handle our grain.
If we were to assume that half the tonnage produced in western Canada this year will be subjected to these discounts, the numbers are absolutely staggering. It's billions of dollars lost, if we are forced to sell our grain under the existing circumstances. In some cases, this is calculating out to more than a 50% price discount from the daily or futures market price being offered for the grain.
Can everybody still hear me okay?