Bill C-49 (Historical)

Transportation Modernization Act

An Act to amend the Canada Transportation Act and other Acts respecting transportation and to make related and consequential amendments to other Acts

This enactment amends the Canada Transportation Act in respect of air transportation and railway transportation.
With respect to air transportation, it amends the Canada Transportation Act to require the Canadian Transportation Agency to make regulations establishing a new air passenger rights regime and to authorize the Governor in Council to make regulations requiring air carriers and other persons providing services in relation to air transportation to report on different aspects of their performance with respect to passenger experience or quality of service. It amends the definition of Canadian in that Act in order to raise the threshold of voting interests in an air carrier that may be owned and controlled by non-Canadians while retaining its Canadian status, while also establishing specific limits related to such interests. It also amends that Act to create a new process for the review and authorization of arrangements involving two or more transportation undertakings providing air services to take into account considerations respecting competition and broader considerations respecting public interest.
With respect to railway transportation, it amends the Act to, among other things,
(a) provide that the Canadian Transportation Agency will offer information and informal dispute resolution services;
(b) expand the Governor in Council’s powers to make regulations requiring major railway companies to provide to the Minister of Transport and the Agency information relating to rates, service and performance;
(c) repeal provisions of the Act dealing with insolvent railway companies in order to allow the laws of general application respecting bankruptcy and insolvency to apply to those companies;
(d) clarify the factors that must be applied in determining whether railway companies are fulfilling their service obligations;
(e) shorten the period within which a level of service complaint is to be adjudicated by the Agency;
(f) enable shippers to obtain terms in their contracts dealing with amounts to be paid in relation to a failure to comply with conditions related to railway companies’ service obligations;
(g) require the Agency to set the interswitching rate annually;
(h) create a new remedy for shippers who have access to the lines of only one railway company at the point of origin or destination of the movement of traffic in circumstances where interswitching is not available;
(i) change the process for the transfer and discontinuance of railway lines to, among other things, require railway companies to make certain information available to the Minister and the public and establish a remedy for non-compliance with the process;
(j) change provisions respecting the maximum revenue entitlement for the movement of Western grain and require certain railway companies to provide to the Minister and the public information respecting the movement of grain; and
(k) change provisions respecting the final offer arbitration process by, among other things, increasing the maximum amount for the summary process to $2 million and by making a decision of an arbitrator applicable for a period requested by the shipper of up to two years.
It amends the CN Commercialization Act to increase the maximum proportion of voting shares of the Canadian National Railway Company that can be held by any one person to 25%.
It amends the Railway Safety Act to prohibit a railway company from operating railway equipment and a local railway company from operating railway equipment on a railway unless the equipment is fitted with the prescribed recording instruments and the company, in the prescribed manner and circumstances, records the prescribed information using those instruments, collects the information that it records and preserves the information that it collects. This enactment also specifies the circumstances in which the prescribed information that is recorded can be used and communicated by companies, the Minister of Transport and railway safety inspectors.
It amends the Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board Act to allow the use or communication of an on-board recording, as defined in subsection 28(1) of that Act, if that use or communication is expressly authorized under the Aeronautics Act, the National Energy Board Act, the Railway Safety Act or the Canada Shipping Act, 2001.
It amends the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority Act to authorize the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority to enter into agreements for the delivery of screening services on a cost-recovery basis.
It amends the Coasting Trade Act to enable repositioning of empty containers by ships registered in any register. These amendments are conditional on Bill C-30, introduced in the 1st session of the 42nd Parliament and entitled the Canada–European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement Implementation Act, receiving royal assent and sections 91 to 94 of that Act coming into force.
It amends the Canada Marine Act to permit port authorities and their wholly-owned subsidiaries to receive loans and loan guarantees from the Canada Infrastructure Bank. These amendments are conditional on Bill C-44, introduced in the 1st session of the 42nd Parliament and entitled the Budget Implementation Act, 2017, No. 1, receiving royal assent.
Finally, it makes related and consequential amendments to the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, the Competition Act, the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, the Air Canada Public Participation Act, the Budget Implementation Act, 2009 and the Fair Rail for Grain Farmers Act.

[Michael Cory, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice-President, Canadian National Railway Company]

Good afternoon, everyone.

I'm only going to spend a brief part of my time discussing the circumstances that put us in this position. I believe it's more useful to focus on what we have done and are doing to recover and ensure that our service is back at the levels that you and our customers have come to expect as quickly as possible.

At the outset, let me point out that the situation has not been taken lightly by CN. On March 5, the CN board of directors took unprecedented, decisive action. You're probably aware that we have a new CEO, J-J Ruest, and within two days of taking up the position, J-J acknowledged our service issues, apologized to our customers, and pledged to do better on behalf of all of us at CN.

The challenges we have been facing are not specific to grain. All areas of our business have been impacted. CN has been facing a capacity and resiliency challenge over the winter.

After six consecutive quarters of flat to negative growth, we underestimated the level of growth that was about to come at us. We're not alone in this; the Bank of Canada and many of our customers also greatly underestimated the strength of the Canadian economy. This has left us seriously stretched, with little resiliency in some corridors.

Frac sand and intermodal traffic are both up very significantly. Forest products, coal, potash, and virtually everything we move saw an increase in volume. Grain volumes were not a surprise and the grain car fleet is sufficient to handle the volume; however, locomotive power and crews have presented a serious challenge, along with winter resiliency that wasn't there this year. We simply did not have enough locomotive power or crews to deal with the rapid increase in business. Hiring and training operating personnel takes a minimum of six to nine months, and there is also a long lead time for acquiring new locomotives and for building capacity.

The increased business also led to bottlenecks at a number of locations on the network. Through the fall and early winter, we were getting by and providing fair service, but we did suffer setbacks in the late fall owing to mainline incidents, including a severe windstorm that blew a train off a bridge in Alberta, shutting down the main line until the bridge could be repaired.

However, as our CEO recently said, we had a horrible February. When the extreme cold hit us in February, forcing us to shorten our trains and requiring even more locomotives, crews, and network capacity, our service deteriorated badly to levels that were clearly unacceptable to our customers and to every one of the hard-working, dedicated CN employees who take great pride in their work.

While our grain service prior to February did not match last year's record numbers, in every month from September to January we moved the third-highest volume of grain in CN's history. This clearly was not sufficient, but not so weak that we cannot recover over the balance of the crop year.

I am pleased to say that we are already making good progress in turning things around in moving the backlog that accumulated in February. In week 31 we spotted 5,349 grain cars, including 772 customer cars, at Prairie elevators; in week 32, we spotted 5,953 cars, including 905 customer cars, and in the week that just ended, we spotted 5,742 cars, including 647 customer cars.

As a reference, we view 4,000 CN cars per week as the normal sustainable capacity of the system in a normal winter operating condition, and 5,500 CN cars as being the sustainable capacity outside of winter and when the port of Thunder Bay is open.

We are confident that we can maintain this pace through the spring. We are committed to catching up, as we are with all of our customer traffic. Our car placement numbers to the week for grain are not yet in line with where they need to be, but there has been significant improvement.

To begin turning things around, the first thing we needed to do was relieve network congestion, particularly in the very busy Edmonton-Winnipeg corridor. We undertook a number of measures to temporarily restrict traffic in this corridor to gain fluidity and velocity in our network. Only by reducing congestion could we create more capacity and resiliency.

We had to make some tough decisions to restrict and regulate the flow of cars into this congested part of our network. For example, we implemented a system controlling the flow of both incremental frac sand and crude cars.

We have also established a 24-7 situation room of cross-functional representatives at our network operations centre in Edmonton to review critical customer issues and to prioritize their movements.

Turning to other actions we have taken to add capacity to our system, in the short and medium term we added 250 qualified conductors in the fourth quarter of 2017, and an additional 400 will have completed their training and be in place by March 31. We will be adding a further 375 conductors in the second quarter. That said, we are still hiring, and there remains a challenge to find new labour at some remote locations. Our national training centre in Winnipeg will remain at full capacity.

With regard to locomotives, CN added 34 new high-horsepower locomotives in Q4 of 2017, and that was all we could get from the manufacturer. We also leased 130 locomotives, some of which required upgrading, but almost all of which are now online. For the longer term, we have placed an order for over 200 new locomotives and will begin to receive the first 60 in the second half of this year.

CN has a strong record of investing in our network. Even in the years with weaker growth, we maintained a very robust capital spending program. Earlier this year, our board of directors approved an increase in our capital expenditures from $2.7 billion to a record $3.2 billion. Over $250 million of this increase will be spent this spring and summer on projects in our western region to increase both track and yard capacity and to create fluidity that will build a base of capacity and resiliency before next winter.

If there is one thing that has become clear from this year's challenges, it's the need for better sharing of data among the supply chain stakeholders. Bill C-49 will require railways to provide even more data than at present, and we accept that. We are, however, only one link in the supply chain, and we are concerned with the lack of data provided by some of the other supply chain participants. For all of us, transparency with all partners in the supply chain is in our interests, and it ultimately benefits the Canadian economy.

Recent actions by our board of directors and all of us at CN have shown how seriously we take these service issues that have adversely affected our customers. Our capacity challenges will not go away overnight, but we have acted aggressively to address them, and I am confident that our service will continue to improve for the grain sector and all parts of our business going forward.

Thank you.

Rail Transportation

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Minister of Transport]

Mr. Speaker, we want to get our western farmers' grain to market as quickly as possible, unlike the previous government, which for 10 years did not do a darn thing to move grain and other commodities more efficiently. By the way, they voted against Bill C-49 and I would ask them to speak to their colleagues in the other House to speed up the process with Bill C-49.

In the meantime, the Minister of Agriculture and I have spoken to CN and CP, and told them that they have to do better. They are doing better, but we will watch them very carefully.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

That's called Bill C-49. It needs to pass. An order in council is not going to get passed by March 19, I can guarantee you that.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm not so sure that writing a letter to the ministers and asking them for action now will solve the issue. They have acted. The House has acted. What we need to do is pass Bill C-49. I understand that it may not be perfect. I remember when my mother used to make me dinner. She would put a steak on my plate, and peas and rice. I didn't like the rice, but I still ate it. It wasn't perfect, but I was thankful for it. I think the best action we can take is pass Bill C-49. I'm failing to understand....

Here we are, going back and forth, arguing about whom we should write. The quickest action this committee can take before March 19—I do recall that we are meeting with stakeholders on March 19—is to send that letter to senators, because they will be meeting, and they have to respond to that. I don't necessarily agree with sending a letter to the Minister of Transport and the Minister of Agriculture when we know that in fact they have acted. They have sent a letter to the rail companies. They have acted on this issue. Their hands are tied, because they don't have the legislative power to act. That's called Bill C-49.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I think that the debate on the letter to the Senate is over. In any case, we've just seen that several groups are asking the Senate to change Bill C-49. Let's let the Senate do its work and respond to grain producers who are requesting amendments, and let's deal with that which concerns us directly.

What concerns us is the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food and the Minister of Transport, and the western grain crisis. It's important that we ask these two ministers to act. That is why we will support the NDP motion asking the committee to write a letter to the two ministers, so that cabinet may intervene immediately in this dossier.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I could not agree more with my two colleagues than I do at this time.

As I said already in my introduction, we offered to split Bill C-49 countless times in order that certain measures be adopted more quickly; we suggested it to the Liberals. We agreed and would have provided our unanimous consent to adopt it at the right time. We said this several times in speeches, as did the other opposition parties. We were ready to have certain parts of Bill C-49 passed quickly because we knew that a crisis was imminent, since this has happened before.

Even though some want to present Bill C-49 as an omnibus bill, in my opinion it is rather inconceivable to amalgamate the rights of airline passengers with the settlement of a grain crisis in the West. Explain to me how those two topics can be related, Mr. Chair. It's incredible.

Now they would like our committee to ask the Senate to accelerate its study of the bill to solve the grain crisis, at the risk of adopting, at the same time, provisions that would have disastrous consequences on the rights of airline passengers. That is not my role.

Some suggestions have already been made. If the Senate wants to split the bill on its own initiative, the opposition will commit to having things move very quickly so that...

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thank you, Chair.

I have mixed feelings about writing a letter to the Senate. I want to see action. I can count, and I realize that we don't have a majority. You have the majority, so whatever happens here will be the Liberal will. As for whether we should write a letter to encourage the Senate to pass a piece of legislation fast, just for one part of the legislation, to deal with a crisis, I'd rather go the other route and split it apart, to do the appropriate study on the entire legislation in the Senate and then do the appropriate study on Bill C-49 on the rail aspect of it. Then you would actually be bringing forward good legislation, not rushed legislation. In the meantime, the minister has the ability to issue an order in council to backstop farmers right now, to have an impact right now, and to see that as Bill C-49 chugs through and perhaps gets amended, it actually comes out as a reasonably good piece of legislation instead of a rupt piece of legislation.

I guess I'm kind of disappointed. If you're going to write a letter, the persons who can have the most impact right now are the ministers and the Prime Minister, not the Senate. The Senate does what the Senate does, in the Senate's time. From talking to the chair of the transportation committee in the Senate, I see that he tried to include more meetings. It was the Liberal independent senators who would not agree to extra meetings. So if you're going to write a letter, I would maybe suggest that you write a letter to the whip of the Liberal senators and ask him why he wouldn't be willing to hold more meetings.

[Ruth Ellen Brosseau, NDP, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you, Chair. I hope that the letters the agriculture committee sends bring action.

I think back to all of the numerous letters on PACA that we wrote recently to the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Innovation. It took us many months to get a response. Finally, we did get a response. I've found it very frustrating and almost insulting that our committee wrote letters and didn't even get notification to say that they got the letter, they're looking at it, and they'll eventually get back to us. Our letters were completely ignored.

I think Bill C-49 is going to be part of the solution. Once again, I think everybody wants to see the portion of Bill C-49 on grain passed, and passed quickly, but it has to be done right. A lot of groups, a lot of farmers, and a lot of our stakeholders have said that it needs to be fixed. It needs to be amended. Once again, I think we have to make sure that we get it right.

As for Bill C-49, we could debate ad nauseam what is an omnibus bill and what is not, but when there is a piece of legislation that changes 13 other pieces of legislation, even though they might have some kind of link, it is an omnibus bill. We're not going to have that debate right now at committee.

I've said before—and I've been thinking about this for a while because Bill C-49 is in the other place—we're looking at ways to get the grain part carved out and expedited. When we get back to the House, I will be asking for unanimous consent to have that done in the Senate. Maybe you guys could look at it. We've been talking to the clerks. We're going to draft a motion. Hopefully, we'll get all-party support to ask the Senate to carve out the grain portion.

I'm not against writing a letter. I think what we should also be writing a letter to the Minister of Agriculture and, notably, the Minister of Transport asking him to act, asking him to look back. He was in the House in 2013-14 in the second opposition party. He needs to look at the measures that were taken by the Conservative government. There are tools he could be using that he isn't using right now.

As the agriculture committee, we have decided to look at this on the 19th, but I think what we need to do is write to the Minister of Transport and ask him to move forward with an order in council. I think we need to ask him to pull out the big stick. Hopefully, the Minister of Agriculture is putting pressure on and working with the Minister of Transport, but we need to be standing up for farmers.

Bill C-49 is one thing, and obviously we're going to do our best to see that the grain portion gets carved out and moved forward with in a decent manner in the Senate, but I think there's something we could do now. We could be putting pressure on the Minister of Transport and asking him to take all the tools available to get grain moving. We can have all the trade deals in the world, but it doesn't matter if we can't get the grain out. The perception of us on the international scene is being tarnished once again because we can't get our shit together, so I'm really hoping that we could all come together. Why don't we put a letter together for the Minister of Transport—and cc it to the Minister of Agriculture—asking him to use all of the tools in the tool box?

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thank you, Chair.

Again, I'm a guest at this committee today, and I appreciate being here. I'm going to draw on some historical knowledge. I've been talking to some of the other people in the room who were here before, when we did this the last time. We had two meetings, and then we had five meetings on Bill C-30, which was the legislation, so you could say that in 2013-14 we had seven meetings to talk about this.

Right now in my riding I have a farmer-owned rail line that has 65 loaded cars sitting there. They have been sitting there and sitting there, and when they are sitting there full of grain, that means everything else behind them is full of grain, so the farmer-owned terminal is full of grain.

To say, okay, we're going to come back when it's convenient for us, I don't think is appropriate. I think we should come back next week and show them that we are committed to this. To me, the 15th makes a lot of sense, because CN and CP are supposed to have that data for us on what their game plan is moving forward.

It's nice to see CN publish it in the paper. I think that's good, but I've had them do this to me in the past so many times when the railways said that they were going to do this and do that. When it comes to actuality, it never happens. That's why you need to have penalties in place. You need to have an order in council in place. That's why I think you need to have the Minister of Transport here, listening to those farmers. He should be here for the full four or eight hours, whatever we do, to really get an understanding of the impact this has on people's livelihoods and on their families, their farms, and their operations.

I would suggest that we come back on the 15th and do the whole day. The ministers can be here. The stakeholders can be here. The farmers can be here. You can take any committee room you want. You can televise it so that people back in western Canada can watch us and listen. It would show from this committee that we're serious, that we're taking this issue very seriously, and that we care.

This isn't a partisan issue. You'll find that at least in the past it has never been a partisan issue. We're on the same side in fighting for our farmers and our producers. CN and CP are the problem here again, unfortunately, and we can learn from the things we did in 2013-14. We can make some fixes and do some improvements in the order in council to make it more effective and efficient. We can have something in place so that the producers know they have a backstop right now, and then Bill C-49 will do what Bill C-49 does, with amendments or without amendments, split apart or not split apart.

The reality on Bill C-49 is that even if you wrote them a letter today, the Senate won't read it until probably the 21st, and then, in terms of the reaction time from there, we would probably be looking at May, June, or July. That's not even a feasible option. You would have more impact by writing a letter to the ministers, because they can do stuff right now. They can do an order in council tonight if they so choose. They can take action if they so choose.

[Ruth Ellen Brosseau, NDP, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

It's frustrating. I know there is goodwill in the proposed subamendments to the motion put forward by my colleague Luc. But, you know, we're on break week from the House, and we've had this important meeting today. We're not sitting next week. I think, because of the context we're in right now, we need to look at this next week. Four hours is four hours. We'll have CN and CP. I would love to have Minister MacAulay and Minister Garneau come before committee and talk about their plan, but I don't see why we can't start looking at this next week.

Writing letters is great. Wishful thinking, good intentions, hoping, and wishing haven't done anything to make this situation better. I think the letters that were put out yesterday were just a front to say, “Look, we're taking this seriously. Look at us dealing with this issue.”

I think you know that the Minister of Transport wrote a letter in January. What happened with that? Nothing.

There are so many things that can and should be done. Looking at this issue in a week or two is going to do what to help farmers? I think people who are in this situation right now are looking towards the agriculture committee to stand up for them, and I think taking this issue seriously would mean we would look at this next week.

We all have responsibilities as members of Parliament and as members of the agriculture committee. I think we should be looking at this next week. I think we should be putting pressure on the minister to be using all the tools in his tool box. In 2013-14 there were measures taken by the Conservative government. Those measures put pressure on the railways to get their act together, and they worked. Penalties—$100,000 a week—are peanuts to CN and CP. The pressure that farmers are under currently.... They should not be in this situation again. We should have learned from the grain crisis in 2013-14. There were signs.

Obviously we cannot go back in time, but I think we need to do our job, and I think we need to put pressure.

And you, too, members of the Liberal government, need to put pressure on your ministers, the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Transport. Bill C-49 is not going to fix everything, but definitely when we get back to the House, I'm going to go forward with a unanimous consent motion to ask the Senate to carve out the grain piece and get that moving along as quickly as possible. The part of Bill C-49 on grain transport needs to get passed, but we have to fix it too. We have to make sure that we get that right, and not just pass it to pass it. It can't just be a band-aid. I think we have to make sure we get this right. We have to take the time and we have to get it right. Amendments and subamendments to this motion are great, but I think we need to look at this seriously. We need to roll up our sleeves; we need to get down to work; and we have to take this seriously.

I think having a meeting next week might by shitty. We have to cancel stuff in our ridings, but it's our responsibility. This is our job, so why not get down to work next week? It's an inconvenience for farmers. This might be an inconvenience for us, but we have a responsibility to fix it.

That's my piece.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Excuse me. I have the floor.

I appreciate that, but again, they should have done this weeks and months ago. We're not here to stand up for the rail companies. We're here to try to address the situation, and it is critical. I would prefer that we meet next week. March 15 would be one date. That's the deadline that the CFA and some of our stakeholders asked for.

Really briefly on my colleague Mr. Drouin's comment on the letter that we should be writing to the Senate, the Senate is not our problem. The Senate is the Senate. Again, this is something that should have been addressed months ago. Also, Bill C-49 may not even resolve all the problems. Our stakeholders, the grain terminals, and the producers also asked for the government to come up with a plan to try to address some of the backlog. Will we solve all the problems? No, but we can certainly put some things in place that will help alleviate some of the situations.

In conclusion, Mr. Chair, I would suggest that we try to meet next week if at all possible and that the government work on putting the infrastructure and the framework in place for an order in council to get the grain moving, and that it take some concrete steps to protect our grain producers and our trade markets that are out there and ensure that we get the grain moving sooner rather than later.

[Eva Nassif, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Bill C-49—

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

And thanks, Mr. Berthold.

The idea of March 19, I think, is a good idea, and four hours is better than two. Generally, Monday evening is an evening when we can get things done. I think that also shows that this committee does work well together, which we do. We are working on behalf of the farmers. I think we do all have a common focus there.

It was good to see the Grain Growers of Canada also mention in their letter: don't make it a partisan issue; just solve the problem.

I want to comment on the omnibus piece, but maybe we could do that after we deal with the subamendment. I spoke on Bill C-49 in the House, and I have some thoughts relating to the purported omnibus nature of the bill, which I want to share with this committee from I said in the House about it, but if we could deal with the subamendment, that would be wonderful.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

I would like to continue talking about my suggestion, and then I will propose a subamendment in a few minutes.

I support the amendment, but I would like it to be a four-hour meeting on March 19 rather than March 21, given the urgency of the matter.

As to Mr. Drouin's suggestion about the committee sending a letter, I would reiterate that Bill C-49 is an omnibus bill that does not concern our committee alone. The letter will have to reflect that, if you want us to agree on sending such a letter. That involves other committees and other stakeholders. The committee may express its concern, but we know that Bill C-49 will not solve the grain shipment problem in the short term. We need a short-term solution now. It is important for the committee to signal that it is monitoring the situation closely.

If we were to hold a four-hour meeting on March 19, that in itself would send a signal that people will have to get moving before March 19 at 4 p.m. If the committee is in the mood to write letters, it could also write to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, calling upon him to take all the measures available to him to intervene as early as March 15, rather than waiting for the committee's meeting on March 21. There are clearly measures the government can take.

I would remind you that the Canadian Federation of Agriculture wants a plan from the government, not just Bill C-49.

As to the subamendment, I propose therefore that the meeting be held on March 19 and that it be four hours long. As to sending our list of suggested witnesses by March 15, that would not change.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thank you, Chair, for being here today.

Of course rail has always been an issue. As Ms. Brosseau said, we last dealt with this in 2013-14, and I'm disappointed that we're back here dealing with it again. There have been some changes between now and then. Then we didn't have the numbers. We didn't see the data. We didn't know what was going on. Now we have Mark Hemmes with the Quorum Corporation giving us that data every week. When you start seeing at week 12 that 50% of the railcars aren't being delivered, that's the first sign. Then, when you start seeing it show up in weeks 13 and 14 and continuing on...activity should have happened a lot sooner, but we can't take that back.

I think we need both ministers because, for example, with the Minister of Transport coming in front of this committee, we're going to need an order in council to actually show some results here. The reality is that Bill C-49, the way it stands right now, would not fix this problem, and the producers are telling you that; the grain companies are telling you that. Basically, anybody who is relying on rail for service is telling you that Bill C-49 won't do, so you need amendments. That means the amendments that have to come out of the Senate will take a lot more time.

In the meantime, we need to have an order in council sitting there with fines. The only thing that CN and CP actually react to is fines, so when they start seeing that there's a penalty for not performing, then they actually stand up and take notice.

I give CN credit for the letter that was in the paper today, whether or not that was a result of today's emergency meeting. I will also give credit to the FCC. Again, it's nice and convenient that it made its announcement at the time when this meeting is taking place. Farmers need to know that. That's another reason why we now need the Minister of Agriculture to come in, because there is a cash flow issue here. You have a transportation issue, for which we need the Minister of Transport to tell us the path forward. What he is going to do in the meantime with an order in council is what I'd like to see, until Bill C-49 is amended and brought back to the House with something we can all support.

Then you go to the cash flow issue, so the Minister of Agriculture is going to have to come in. Whether it's having advance programs, talking to all the banks, and doing what they did with the FCC, he needs to have a game plan moving forward now on spring advances, because cash flow is a big issue. We need to figure out what that's going to look like, so he needs to report on that. It's not as though they've never done this before. The department has done things like this in the past, so it's not as though he is taking any new path forward. He can lean on experiences in the department from the past and do something there. That's basically an hour of a meeting.

Then you talk about CN and CP coming in for an hour. I think that's good, because they need to present their path forward and what they're doing. I think CN, in their article, talked about leasing locomotives and putting managers on the lines, and that's good. I wish they would have been doing it in week 12 instead of now, because road bans are hitting. Basically, with road bans, restrictions come into play, and then they usually don't get lifted until we start seeding. So by seeding time, we have a whole pile of grain that has to move into terminals; guys are trying to put their crop in; and everything just hits the farm at the same time. There's no ability to spread it out. That's why the winter season is so important to move grain: you have the frozen roads; you can move grain, and you don't have to worry about planting, spraying, or anything else going on at that time. Again, we can't take that back. It's unfortunate, but that's just the way it is.

So you look at that, and then you say, “Now we want to talk to producers.” Think about it. One hour of producers would get you four producers in here from three prairie provinces—Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba—and then there are even some producers in northern B.C. That doesn't even get you one per province. Then you have three parties here, so everybody is going to want their producers here. So again, one hour is inadequate to give you a good idea of how it's impacting different areas across the Prairies.

And it does have an impact on different areas. When CN and CP start getting behind, instead of bringing cars into Saskatchewan and Manitoba, because it's a longer trip, they flip things through Alberta more quickly and ignore Saskatchewan and Manitoba, so you have to deal with these inter-regional aspects. There are lots of things to consider here before you can just say, “Hey, we're going to have an emergency meeting” and feel good. Farmers won't buy it, guys. It shows that you're not willing to do the job. It just shows that you're going to show the goodwill but not actually put any teeth into anything to get results. So you need the order in council. You need to move this forward. You need to do it now, because it has waited too long.

Chair, I guess I'll wrap it up there. Just keep in mind that if you're sitting on the farm right now, you have bills to pay from last year. You're supposed to be buying inputs for next year, so you're supposed to order your canola and stuff like that. A lot of that stuff is supposed to have been ordered in December or November, and all of those bills are starting to come due. You have bins full of grain. We have some 40 ships sitting out on the west coast waiting to be loaded. This is a crisis. This is very real. I'm sorry, but pushing off until it's convenient for us isn't acceptable. We need to do it now.

Thank you, Chair.