Transport committee  My recommendations do not all stand together. You could take one out and the rest would work. They're not a whole. I prioritized them because people came up to me—nobody here from this committee—and asked me, “If you could only have one, which one would it be?” I've said the one that it would be, because I'm looking at it.

Transport committee  I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't actually know the answer to that question. It's rare that I don't have an opinion, but I don't.

Transport committee  I will answer that by saying that while our systems are very different, to the extent that we have an opportunity to grab better systems from other places, I think we should do so. If somebody has a better idea, we should do it, and right now they have a data disclosure system that is better than ours.

Transport committee  Yes, certainly that has to be one of the objectives. I would have said that by the nature of the exclusion zones the main thing that's happening is eliminating competition that might be possible between CN and CP. Really, the LHI is dedicated to the idea of what the rate is going to be for the origin portion to connect to that connecting carrier.

Transport committee  On the last one as to whether we should prioritize transportation in NAFTA, the systems are very different. I don't think that the goal, or even an important goal of NAFTA would be to harmonize our rail transportation policy and systems. They are very, very different. I think that would be a pretty darned tall order to try to do, particularly in the current environment.

Transport committee  You've heard testimony already that those exclusion zones essentially mean the remedy, if it's going to be viable at all, will be viable for I think the group that my colleague here was intending to have replaced with long-haul interswitching that used to have access to extended interswitching.

Transport committee  I accept all of those comments, but I would do one thing on reciprocal penalties for sure. I would allow the agency a lot more latitude in the setting of those reciprocal penalties than they currently have. Right now, when you invoke a process, the agency has the ability to award a return of expenses incurred, hard costs.

Transport committee  I've been listening to you on this topic, so I can tell that you have a fair bit of experience in this. This is complex. I act for some short-lines—strapped for cash, hard to get capital, hard to get customers, and they're squeezed oftentimes by the class I rail carrier to which they connect.

Transport committee  Nonsense. Let me just get on that one, because I hear that a lot too. They do this in the States. The URCS requires this data disclosure right now. CN and CP have to disclose that data in the United States; there's no reason that it can't be disclosed in Canada. Further, this bill does a lot of aggregation, even on the performance data, that does not occur in the States.

Transport committee  No, that isn't the case. I know that it's a very tempting thing to say, but I can tell you that U.S. shippers are frustrated by what they have. What they have is more than what we have on this front, but what we should do because of our modern data ability—data gathering and data transferring abilities—is to make this stuff transparent.

Transport committee  First of all, it does look like the former point, so I'll concede that, but it's really on the latter point that I'm trying to focus my comments. If an agency decides, for example, that this x level of service is required in these circumstances in order to meet the adequate and suitable standard that everybody seems to have problems with, which, by the way, I don't have a problem with, but if the agency has to make a decision that is now balanced between the two, the agency has to give meaning to those words.

Transport committee  My view is that we already have some precedents to help us address how quickly a review should occur. I'll give you the answer first. I think it should be two years, but I would live with four. Here's the reason. The SLA mechanism was introduced through Bill C-52 in 2013. Last year we had precisely zero SLAs go before the agency.

Transport committee  That's a very good question. If I had it my way, we would do it differently from the way I'm articulating. I'd be asking a lot of you. Ideally what would happen is that shippers would have an opportunity to get a sense of the railway's costs before they went into the final offer arbitration process.

Transport committee  If you made the data that's found in clause 76 available to you and you had in Canada a data disclosure system like the URCS that I described, then you could do it, but not with these amendments. It would take quite a bit more.

Transport committee  I could do an example like this for virtually every shipment in Canada. Anybody who would want to use trucks to move coal would similarly have lost their mind. I did this calculation once, put 25 million tonnes on the road, and you're talking about one truck every two and a half minutes, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.