Transport committee  That would become the terms of the contract between the shipper and the railway. If there's a breach or if the shipper claims there's a breach, then they would go to the agency and ask that an arbitrator establish that and establish liquidated damages.

Transport committee  Other than the example—

Transport committee  It could be based on a model from the commodity exchanges. In agriculture we use arbitration a lot to resolve disputes. The Grain Commission resolves grading disputes between producers and grain companies. Commodity exchanges resolve disputes between their clients and customers.

Transport committee  Yes. I guess the way we would see this working is that you would go to the arbitrator—

Transport committee  That's right.

Transport committee  Yes. If you're asking me what I would want to see in a service level agreement, I might like a model like that and I might want it to be a final offer arbitration model, where the railway might say “Okay, this is what I'm offering on liquidated damages”. The shipper might say, “This is what I'm offering”.

Transport committee  I can start on the grain side, if you'd like, Mr. Goodale. There are more examples. Some of it has to do with car condition, where there are service problems. I'll give you a recent example. I was just talking to one of the companies yesterday. They said they had a train booked to arrive at their facility on Wednesday and were all geared up to load, but the train didn't come on Wednesday.

Transport committee  Sure. I don't mean to monopolize all the answers.

Transport committee  Thanks, guys. For the grain industry, a problem first manifests itself or becomes visible to us when a car isn't spotted. I describe some of the problems in my presentation. When you're facing railcar demurrage at an unload terminal, then you have to add that up. Then it depends on how long you're paying vessel demurrage as you're waiting for that grain to arrive.

Transport committee  Yes. It ties a bit into the question you asked Ian. We placed them there in the order they appear in the bill. Many of them are inextricably linked to one another. When we started this process, under a very short timeline, at the Coalition of Rail Shippers we had over 30. We said this wasn't going to work; we needed to pare it down to the minimum we needed to get at the stated objectives of the bill.

Transport committee  We're thankful to the government for making rail service a top priority on its legislative agenda. The entire shipping community has been through a multitude of processes leading up to Bill C-52, which started in 2006 and which, we hope, will finally result in the necessary backstop for balanced accountability.

Transport committee  No, there isn't. You're talking about grain, so maybe I can just talk about it briefly. You've described it perfectly. What happens is that the grain shippers will put in an order for cars. Let's just pick a number, let's say 7,000 cars in a given week, all for grain shippers.

Transport committee  Sure, I'll get to the point. You pay all these extra costs. To add insult to injury, you're paying demurrage, because the cars were bunched at the terminal elevator. And the railways do not pay any of those. They do not compensate the shipper for any of those added costs.

Transport committee  Can I just add to that? What the railways are saying when they make that statement is that they are going to be unduly harmed by this legislation. What we're talking about here is improving shipper protection provisions or mechanisms to resolve problems after they've occurred.

Transport committee  That's a very good explanation, Marta. To add, going into an FOA or a group FOA is not something shippers are going to take frivolously or lightly. They're going to look at all other options before they'll go into a process like that, and the fact that they have to put forward an offer that's common to all is the key, because if they're unable to do that they won't be able to go into the process to begin with.