Agriculture committee  The railways weren't involved in the discussions with the shipper group, nor were they involved in the discussions with Transport Canada. The thinking at that time was that the situation had regressed to such a point that there was no way we were going to be able to sit down and reach a consensus with the railways.

Agriculture committee  I think GX 100 is a good example. It shows how the railways can perform when there are penalties. What we're seeing is that when there are penalties, they're moving, and they're spotting it at a higher level. When there aren't penalties, they're not. This is also illustrated by some of the other things CN does for other industries.

Agriculture committee  It's shared between the grain company and the farmer.

Agriculture committee  A large portion of it, yes.

Agriculture committee  Well, no, we don't, in a simple response.

Agriculture committee  I just wanted to mention that if a grain company sells canola to Japan and they aren't able to meet their contractual commitments, they don't go to the customer and say, “We didn't get the grain from the farmer, so we're going to be late”, or “We can't fulfill our obligations.” We have items in place in our contract with the farmer to mitigate damages.

Agriculture committee  Likewise on CN, we don't have a recommendation on the Wheat Board file whatsoever. But the changes we are recommending to the Canada Transportation Act are going to be required regardless of what happens or doesn't happen with the Canadian Wheat Board. You said people are asking you if we need the Wheat Board there to counterbalance what otherwise we'd be left with in terms of an imbalance if they weren't there.

Agriculture committee  I'll start with your last question. CP is performing better than CN. We don't have an accurate measurement, but they're spotting at closer to 80%, and we're seeing a trend to more grain moving to CP because of it. But companies are obviously limited in their ability to do this, because if they're located on a CN line it costs more to the company and the farmer to truck that grain to a CP site.

Agriculture committee  It's difficult to rank them, but I would say they're up there for the grain industry, for sure.

Agriculture committee  We're not sure, but we think that because the average isn't moving.... We're still at 60%; the car cycle times haven't really improved. We would have expected car cycle times to improve really considerably over the last 15 years since the grain industry rationalized, but they haven't.

Agriculture committee  Yes. To speak on the GX 100s, first of all, those are pretty good. We're seeing those products performing better than the rest of the allocation. But what we're not seeing is the average going up. So while GX 100s are getting better, the rest of the allocation must be getting worse.

Agriculture committee  If I may, I'll answer your last question first. I think it's important that people understand what goes into building a train. It takes a lot of resources to load a 100-car unit train. When the companies have a train scheduled to arrive, to be spotted at their elevator on a particular day, what they'll often do is dedicate all their resources to loading that train.

Agriculture committee  I can provide the committee with a full list after the meeting, if you'd like, but what I could do is go over the ones that were more notable for the grain industry. All of them are important, but I highlighted some of them just for the purposes of letting you know. Basically it was the ability for parties to file final offer arbitration as a group.

Agriculture committee  I'm glad you asked that question. You're right, we had a lot of debates. There was a lot of heated discussion among the shippers in Canada to reach a consensus. A lot of the discussions have really been exhausted over the last nine months. Yes, we are frustrated. We were challenged to reach a consensus.

Agriculture committee  We just have a few concluding paragraphs.