Agriculture committee  I think this is really all about grain, what we're talking about, but at the end of the day it can't be all about grain because there are a lot of trains hauling other commodities. There are manufactured goods, commercial goods, the mining industry, the coal industry, the forest

Agriculture committee  I'll just touch on that. The government did fund the study that Pulse Canada is leading, and those are the metrics: how many cars are being spotted every week, how many are being unloaded every week, how many are in transit, and where the problems are. Is it at the terminals? Is

Agriculture committee  I think Kevin might want to jump in on this one as well. In the States, for example, you can trade whole trains. For example, if one of Kevin's members really needed 100 cars and he just couldn't get the cars here, he would go to another company and say, “Look, why don't I give y

Agriculture committee  I just wonder if Kevin could also comment on this as an actual shipper, and then I'll speak right after Kevin.

Agriculture committee  Yes, to make good decisions, you need good information. Pulse Canada has a contract to do a bunch of that research to determine the metrics and measure things. I think that sort of work is absolutely key, and the government has funded a project for that. That is very welcome beca

Agriculture committee  Just following up on the forecasting part, I would say it's very true about the forecasting even within that current year. Maybe one thing we should look at is who will do this forecasting and get this data? Is there a bigger role for Statistics Canada to play, for example, in ge

Agriculture committee  I'll go first, and then I see Richard Gray also reaching for the microphone. We in the Canada Grains Council have everybody in the tent already. I think our organization needs to show a lot of leadership. There is one suggestion. Maybe the others have other thoughts on who else

Agriculture committee  —that feeling of getting together and working as a group.

Agriculture committee  Well, I think that on the grain side we will get organized. We will pull ourselves together. We will make our five-to-ten-year targets. I'm not sure if all the other commodity shippers will do the same thing without some encouragement. I think that's a role for government. It's

Agriculture committee  I think we have to take responsibility in our industry to do that long-term look. I think we're the ones who need to sit down as an industry with each of those commodity councils: the Canola Council, the Flax Council, the Barley Council, the wheat council, the corn council, and t

Agriculture committee  We actually have a group called the Grains Roundtable, just like there's a beef round table. That's actually in place. I think that we have just woken up and we just need to get working as an industry. This has been a big wake-up call for us. I think we can start on that. Just

Agriculture committee  I think what Kevin's getting at is that we do have customers everywhere and whether the broad target...the railways will work within that. I think if you've got the penalties underpinning all of this, which is what you're putting in place, I'm optimistic that the grain will move

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much and thanks to my colleagues who spoke so well before I did. The Canada Grains Council is made up of a number of councils. It's the Canola Council of Canada, the Flax Council of Canada, those commodity associations. It's also made up of general farm organizati

Agriculture committee  Thank you. I was actually asked if I could move it to 8:30 tonight, but my wife bought tickets to the play Seeds tonight and if I missed yet one more event with my wife, I don't want to have to send the bill for what that's going to cost me in jewellery and everything else back