Agriculture committee  It's the opposite. Penalties are something that we have in negotiated agreements with a number of customers. That's just part of the reality. We do that today. People make commitments to us, and we make commitments to them, and we have reciprocal penalties in a number of contrac

Agriculture committee  Well, I can say we're already under a pretty significant level of regulation, particularly in this marketplace. There are lots of regulatory remedies, tools that are available to all of our customers to use, regulatory tools, and that includes right up to and including the new ac

Agriculture committee  It's a completely different environment in the U.S. It's one that operates on commercial principles, as opposed to what we do here. They don't have an MRE type of environment as we do. That's a pretty obvious example of the difference. They deal with it as you're doing with other

Agriculture committee  I will add to what I said earlier in terms of dealing with the size of the crop. We have the specific things that I mentioned in terms of the current crop year, and I won't repeat it in the interests of time, but we also are looking ahead to the next crop year and after that. We

Agriculture committee  The one comment I wanted to add was with respect to western Canada, a high priority area for us. We're a bulk railway and 40% of what we move are bulk commodities. They tend to be located in western Canada, whether it's coal or potash or grain, and grain is the largest of those.

Agriculture committee  The only thing I would add, Mr. Chairman, is to build on my comment previously about capital expenditures. This is a hugely capital intensive business, maybe more than any other sector. Our capital program is not just about maintaining what we already have. It's also about deal

Agriculture committee  I'll look at it completely differently and disagree with you—

Agriculture committee  With the locomotives—and I went through this earlier—we had a fleet size that we have downsized by taking out our least productive, least efficient locomotives. There was not a lot of value in having those. Some of those weren't being used nearly as well as they could have been a

Agriculture committee  I'll have to disagree with you because we had record levels of demand placed on us in the fall, between September and November, and we did handle it. That same fleet is still there. We're challenged now because of this extreme, and I think I say—

Agriculture committee  We handled it right through the period September through November, so it was three months' demand that we were faced with. We also were faced with declining potash volumes during that same period, so—

Agriculture committee  And we did. Exactly.

Agriculture committee  Okay, we'll start with the first one. There are a lot of elements to winter planning. Obviously, it's something that we take a lot of time on, because we know we're faced with this every year. We do this in conjunction with our customers, and governments are very engaged with us

Agriculture committee  Yes. Let me just pick up on the second point that you raised. You used the phrase “reliability and predictability” and caught my attention with that. That's something we've tried to speak about a lot because at CP we do a lot of contracting with customers across our different lin

Agriculture committee  I'll just add briefly to that. I agree with the points you just heard. I won't repeat too much, but we think we have the right size of fleet here to be able to move grain. On the point about competition, that's something we are acutely aware of. There is a lot of competition for

Agriculture committee  I think what I would say are two things. One, we would continue to do what we do every year. We haven't talked a lot about how we work with our customers in terms of winter planning, which is a really important exercise we go through every year. Obviously, we would continue to d