Transport committee  No, what I would say is that in fact the government did the right thing. The president of CN was here last week—

Transport committee  —except the bill, exactly. The president of CN acknowledged that the service changes they had made in introducing precision railroading were done perhaps too fast, without enough customer communication, and that there were a lot of unhappy customers. Then they launched into the

Transport committee  Well, if you accept our amendment, there would be no tax, but I'll let Mike—

Transport committee  I'll point out one thing. In that freight rail service review, in the survey, they asked shippers how many of them knew about existing recourse, and 8% of them knew about the provisions that were already in existence for recourse, for example, going to the CTA. There was a great

Transport committee  That's a difficult comparison to make. To answer your question, if you are close to CP and CN, you have the right to interchange. You might have only one rail line close to you, but if you're close enough to the other one, then there's an obligation by the other one to quote you

Transport committee  The other point is that you have to look at it as a total network. There's an intense amount of competition that goes on because, typically for a customer, especially for very large shipments, such as coal or grain shipments to China, or shipments of merchandise from China to her

Transport committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee. My name is Michael Bourque and I am the president and CEO of the Railway Association of Canada. My colleagues, Gord Peters, Michael Murphy, Robert Taylor from CP, Sean Finn, and Shauntelle Paul, are here as well. Some will

International Trade committee  One of the things we're doing is moving a lot of auto parts. Don't forget that Japanese cars are made here. Toyotas and Hondas are made here. We're importing auto parts in the creation of those vehicles and shipping those vehicles to global markets. Again, it's a snowball effect.

International Trade committee  I wish I had the president of the railway suppliers here who could answer that question for the suppliers.

International Trade committee  One of the trends that I talked about, which is the most important trend in the transportation business, is supply chain integration. One of the key factors in that has been containerization. If you look at what's happened with containerization, we've started to import a lot more

International Trade committee  I'll jump in on that. One thing I should mention—and maybe I did mention it, but I'll repeat it—is that we have a number of suppliers in our association. We have a relationship with the Canadian Association of Railway Suppliers, and we consulted them before coming here. They are

International Trade committee  We're supportive of the agreement because we're seeing quite a bit of two-way trade. We're positioned to enable that and I think it's good for the country.

International Trade committee  I'm glad that you mentioned Chicago. It's true that CN bought a line to get around Chicago. That was because 70% of all rail traffic in the United States touches Chicago. There's a bottleneck going right through Chicago. Twice a day, freight rail is held up—45 minutes in the morn

International Trade committee  What you've seen over the last 10 years is a significant transformation in the rail business. It wasn't that long ago that CN was a crown corporation. What we've seen is there have been investments. Yes, some of those rail lines that are no longer used unfortunately end up being

International Trade committee  I think what she's describing is a particular issue that relates to an agreement between truckers and the terminal. What I'm telling you is that in the railway business we have taken great efforts to sign collaboration agreements with performance metrics, with terminals, with por