Transport committee  Those are all awesome questions, and I don't know the answer to any of them. We've never been against a reasonable rate of return to the railways for proper investment in the system. The devil is in the detail on those types of things. We would want to spend a lot of time working with the agency to understand how it plans on doing it and to try to provide our perspectives as we get into the meat on this.

Transport committee  We see the shippers entering into discussions with railways and negotiations on what a service contract would look like after Bill C-49 passes, presuming that it passes in a similar form to what it is today. We see them entering into negotiations, and then if and when those negotiations fail, the parties would each submit their best offer to an arbitrator and the arbitrator would decide.

Transport committee  That's an excellent question and it gets to the heart of one of our four amendments, actually, which is the list of interchanges. With the introduction of Bill C-49, there will be two different sets of instructions or requirements under publishing a list of interchanges. For long-haul interswitching, it would say the railways have to publish a list and they can remove anything from that list with 60 days' notice.

Transport committee  No, it's not a bluff. You'd be prepared to move your business to the competitor. You will go to the primary carrier and say, “What can you do for me for rates on service?” The primary carrier would say, “This is what I can do for you.” You would say, “That's not good enough. I need to meet a time window for my customer in the U.S. and you're not providing service that allows me to get product within that contract window.”

Transport committee  It's both. It could be rates or it could be service, or it could be both together. You would say, “Your rates are too high and you can't provide service, or you can't provide service in the time that I need it, so I'm going to a competitor” and then I'm going to get an interchange to move traffic from CN to CP, for example, or from CN to Burlington Northern.

Transport committee  It's available with a competitor as long as there's an interswitch or interchange within 160 kilometres that can accommodate that track.

Transport committee  Exactly. You don't need permission from the agency or anything like that. That would or would not prompt the primary carrier to take a second look at that and say, “Gee, that's a loss of business for me. That's a loss of traffic. Can I sharpen my pencil in any way here?”

Transport committee  You mean to get to the interswitch?

Transport committee  That's a good question. There's an answer to that, but it—

Transport committee  My memory is being jogged. Back in 2013-14, there were situations in which we were trucking grain from one elevator to another because one elevator was getting good service and the other elevator wasn't getting good service. We were doing it in limited circumstances. There were some heavy costs associated with it, and it was being done under desperate circumstances.

Transport committee  Chris, do you want to answer that?

Transport committee  Yes.

Transport committee  We are. It's pretty well the way we asked for it. I read SARM's brief and I think they just were mistaken about where it's included and how.

Transport committee  Yes, it's both. It was used both actively and passively. Something is only good as a threat, to be used as a threat, if you actually use it. It was used in both ways and a shipper would decide, I don't like the rate, I don't like the terms of service, I'm going to do an extended interswitch.

Transport committee  I don't see that scenario. We're still talking about, in many, cases turning a monopoly into a duopoly, which ain't that great. We're talking about putting in place a small measure of competition. We're not talking about wild competition like you might see in the retail sector, for example, so I don't see that's the case.