Agriculture committee  It's volume-related and it's the extra cost of inflation.

Agriculture committee  I think we'd prefer a system where the economy dictated the flow of things, and the pull and push of the market forces would dictate how everything would work. Unfortunately, that's not the system we have. The railways really do not have the same competitive forces as other indus

Agriculture committee  The information piece has a number of components. Statistics Canada does estimates of total crop production by province with an extensive survey of producers, but I'm not sure whether I agree with Richard that the problem is they're surveying producers. They have a long lag time

Agriculture committee  I think there's still a great deal of a learning curve to know how and whether interswitching will make a big difference. I think there probably would be some occasions where there's an interswitching point that will allow southern movement into the U.S. that might not have other

Agriculture committee  Picking up on Richard's last point, it's pretty easy to forecast what 2014-15 is going to look like, with 20 million to 25 million tonnes of carry-out, even given an average crop. So unless we have a huge drought evident, in June we're going to know that we're going to have a hel

Agriculture committee  There is one port that is owned or partially owned by Inland Terminals. That's Alliance Grain. I think they feel, as I believe, that considerably more capacity of grain can come forward in a coordinated fashion.

Agriculture committee  I'm sorry. No, I don't.

Agriculture committee  Well, he had better not be. If that's the maximum capacity, we're in serious trouble, especially if we're looking at all the ports and Thunder Bay opening soon, and we should be getting southern movement going as well. I think there is more capacity than that. We heard from grai

Agriculture committee  I'm not sure whether Mr. Mongeau was talking about elevator capacity in the country or port terminal capacity. I would see the next bottleneck potentially being port terminal capacity, particularly in Vancouver. I think we need to know where that capacity is. We need to push th

Agriculture committee  I think it was touched on by everybody involved but I do agree with other presenters that it's hard to regulate every detail on every corridor and you go further and further down into a hole of trying to regulate everything. But maybe having some broad outlines would be good. If

Agriculture committee  I'm hesitant to speak for the entire group but I think there is probably some place for a coordinating agency for railcar allocation and for movement. At Richard's conference earlier this week, Perry Pellerin, who handles logistics for a number of the farmer-owned inland termin

Agriculture committee  Thanks very much. We really appreciate the opportunity to present the views of farmer-owned inland terminals. ITAC, the Inland Terminal Association of Canada, represents the interests of seven grain terminal companies in Saskatchewan and Alberta, companies that are at least 50

Agriculture committee  ITAC members are handlers of Canadian Wheat Board grains, in fact, disproportionately so, because for a private terminal without international connections handling Canadian Wheat Board grains—and the Canadian Wheat Board was doing the marketing—you just get paid for handling. It

Agriculture committee  It's about communication and coordination. The railways claim that they're very modern and know where everything is happening. They don't seem to communicate when they have a problem. They don't seem to be able to coordinate things. A lot of it has to do with efficiency and getti

Agriculture committee  I guess the position is that mandatory outward inspection should be removed. The Canadian Grain Commission should and could still have an accreditation role for any third-party inspections. If you have a country, let's say Brazil, and they decide that this customer in Brazil wa