Mr. Allen, it's pretty funny. When we were on the other side on back-to-work legislation, you didn't like it very much when we tried to tell the arbitrator what terms he had to consider in making up deals, but here on the other side, the more terms we give to the arbitrator, the happier people seem to be in terms of this issue.
That's a serious question and it deserves a serious answer, and it's this. The transportation of grain by rail certainly is a large cost to the producer, to the farmer, and that's something that's passed on from the shipper. That's why we still have a regulated rate, in a sense, for the shipment of grain. The railways cannot exceed a maximum revenue in terms of the shipment of grain.
When they do exceed it above a cap that is set by the Canadian Transportation Agency, the money is put into a fund that goes into research. That's how that system and that process are set up.
What the government is saying is that we understand this is a very large part of the cost associated with getting your grain to market, and we all accept and recognize that this is an important piece of rail transportation, so that's why we have a maximum revenue. We can have a lot of discussions about whether that makes sense, but those are discussions for the CTA, because this really is a complex issue.
From my perspective, as you move forward in talking about how to ensure a balance in the system, the more reliable and efficient our transportation, the quicker we can get that grain out of country elevators. That's where farmers deliver. That's where they have to deposit. The problem this year, as you know, is that the elevators were full because they weren't moving down the chain.
We focus on making sure that the system can move, that you unload in the terminal at the end of your destination, and that completely along the way you have every step of the process working together. We believe that the legislation helps to do that in a number of ways and that at the end of the day it will be beneficial for the farmer. The sooner we can move along and the more investment we have in the chain, the better efficiency we will have. The relationship with shippers and rail and the farmers is incredibly important.
We agree with you on one point: it's not the farmer or the producer who should be paying the price when we have big companies involved in moving the grain. As you know, shippers are trying to make their dollars, and when they have very little capacity, they have the ability to buy the grain at a very low price because of market demand.
As one final point, I would say, and I think it's important to create this baseline, that a Liberal government deregulated CN, and it's probably one of the best things they ever did, because it—