Agriculture Committee on Oct. 22nd, 2009

[Jean-Jacques Ruest]

You have 13 of these sites that--as is well known now--we intend to delist, and we're still waiting for orders to come in. So even though we used the wrong newspaper last summer, these sites are publicly known. They are listed today; you can place orders today. It would go a long way in keeping the sites open if orders were to come through.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Okay. So if I place an order today for one of these sites, in what year will I get my car?

[Jean-Jacques Ruest]

No, there's nothing wrong--

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

It's absolutely horrible, the service you provide on the Prairies, and how you take farmers for granted. You know you have your revenue and you know you have the movement, and you ignore us. I've had trucks on the road on a Sunday morning going to terminal--I've repeated this story and I'll repeat it again--and because your train hasn't shown up, I've had to reroute those trucks. That's my cost, not yours.

When we go back to CN or CP, they don't care. So why should I trust you now?

[Jean-Jacques Ruest]

We're now way beyond the producer cost. In going back to the producer cost, you place an order and we'll take your order and do our best to fill it. Right now there's a backlog only for the Port of Vancouver. We're current in the other port.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Okay.

Cam, what's your history from when you order a car to when you get it?

[Cam Goff]

It can vary a great deal. It has been as soon as two weeks and as long as two and a half months before they send a car.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

After you load a car, what's the history of getting that car to the port and payment?

[Cam Goff]

That can go from just over a week to two and a half months. Sometimes it's partially CN's fault; it's also been the fault of the terminals. We had some malt barley that we shipped in the middle of November and we didn't get the cheques until the middle of February.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

What's the penalty if you take longer than eight hours?

[Cam Goff]

What I've seen written down is $360 a day, although when we have been penalized it has been only $165 per car per day.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

What's the penalty if CN doesn't deliver the car on time?

[Cam Goff]

Nothing.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

What's the penalty to you as a producer if you lose the grain out of your car?

[Cam Goff]

There's no penalty; it just disappears. You have to realize that a lot of producers don't weigh our grain going into the cars. We know how much our trucks hold and we make sure we're under the amount. In places like West Central, they could identify a loss, but for people such as myself.... There was one car that ended up being about 25 tonnes under what we thought we loaded, but what do you do? It's at the terminal--

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Were you reimbursed for those 25 tonnes?

[Cam Goff]

No.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

If you were doing non-board grains, how would you go about doing a claim or a process on a claim? Let's say you were shipping feed barley or something like that domestically.

[Cam Goff]

It's almost impossible to ship anything other than Wheat Board grains on a producer car, because with the ongoing consolidation in the grain handling industry, if you don't have a terminal position to unload those producer cars, you can't load them, because nobody's going to unload them at port.

You know, we started off doing dealer cars--that's what they're called--of rapeseed. We'd phone up a company and they'd get a price for us on canola. We'd load the cars, off it would go to port, and it would be unloaded. You can't do that anymore. It's really pretty much strictly board grains that you can easily ship through producer cars.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Your time has expired, Mr. Hoback.

I'd like to continue with this discussion just a little bit before we move to our next round. I was going to ask about this anyway because of Mr. Easter's question.

I'm not clear on this, Mr. Ruest, especially with the testimony that Mr. Goff just gave. It still appears that if a farmer brings in, say, 25 tonnes, for the sake of argument, and puts it on a car, and it gets to Vancouver or Churchill or wherever it's going and then there are only 20 tonnes or 18 tonnes or whatever, there's no reimbursement in place without basically making the farmer do the equivalent of swimming the English Channel.

You led me to believe that basically it was all looked after, but I'm kind of wondering.

[Jean-Jacques Ruest]

Well, we have no knowledge of how much product is put in a car, whether it's a grain car or a pulp car. The shipper would have the knowledge of what they put in. Sometimes they use scales. Sometimes they know exactly how many tonnes or how much weight they put in. Sometimes they may not know with the equipment they have. That's the first step. The railroad doesn't know that. The shipper will know that.

Second, for the grain, at destination the grain would be weighed. The terminal operator wouldn't know how much they off-loaded, so if product is lost, we're looking for a claim. Obviously, we're looking for information to come to us about how much was in the car when it was shipped and how much was in the car when it was unloaded. With those facts, we can act. Without any facts, how can we act? We don't load or unload the car; we just move it.

Also on that point, I don't know how far back in the past people want to go about all the issues going back to Methuselah, but on the 3,000 cars that we lease from the federal government, we've put them in the shop in the last 24 months. All of them went through a rehab. All of them went through quite a bit of expense--our expense--to fix them, including the gates. These cars are in much better condition today than they were two years ago.

We recognized that it was time to do some maintenance on some of these cars, including on the gates, which could cause product to leak, and we spent quite a bit of money in our shop in Winnipeg to fix those 3,000 cars.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I'm not a guy to add more regulations and bookwork because,God only knows we have enough of it now, but I'm wondering if the Wheat Board, and the producers, Mr. Goff, and CN could come up with some kind of way to help verify what's there, whether it's an affidavit signed by some individual, or something else, I don't know. But I think this is obviously a problem that has not been addressed completely.

Mr. Valeriote, for five minutes, please.

[Frank Valeriote, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Yes, just to follow along what Mr. Hoback has asked about, and just so there's no confusion, I strongly share his sentiments. I'm sorry that I heard you say that you're just in the business of moving cars. I would have thought you would say that you're in the business of providing affordable, accessible, and timely transportation to those who need your service.

[Jean-Jacques Ruest]

That's correct.

[Frank Valeriote, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Well, you didn't say that, so I'm concerned, frankly, that your attitude is reflected in how you're dealing with your customers.

I don't mean to put you on the spot, but you're not selling donuts and you're not selling coffee. You're providing a service to a captive audience. Frankly, I regret to say that this is the first time in my year as an MP that I have seen a coalescence of opinion around this table about how these farmers are being treated.

I remember that years ago in Guelph we had this rails-to-trails program, where we took out rails. Now I can cycle down that path. I'll tell you that now we're regretting having done that, because the time is coming quickly when the railway is going to be the transportation.... If it's not now, it's the transportation of the future, and you should be preserving these rail lines.

So my question to you is this: firstly, do you agree—and it has to be a short answer, yes or no--with the trends that Mr. Hill spoke of and that these will be more relied on in the future?