I've said that I've supported the fallback provisions of the panel, and their fallback provisions include our recommendation, so I'll speak to both of them at the same time.
The panel recommended in its fallback provisions that the railways provide advance notification of service changes. That was the first recommendation: that they would provide advance notification of changes to service that are affecting anybody, any of their stakeholders. The second was to enter service agreements with their customers. This was the recommendation we put forward.
Now, just to build on that and to give you some idea of what we're recommending, a service agreement is basically an agreement that defines the roles and responsibilities of both parties. It's a balanced agreement that says “these are the standards we both agree to adhere to”. It says how they agree to measure their performance--their service effectiveness--against those standards; what their agreed-upon terms are and what the terms are of the consequences for non-performance; what they agree to do in order to communicate with each other to manage problems; and what is their agreed-upon dispute resolution mechanism.
It's a service level agreement. Government has service level agreements. Microsoft has service level agreements. International and multinational logistics companies have them. They define the responsibilities of both parties. It's a contract, in effect, but it deals with service. This is what we're talking about.
In our case, for the pulse industry's service level agreement, we're not saying that you must meet 100% of my demand 100% of the time. What we're saying is this: you understand the constraints on your pipeline, you understand the seasonality of flows of coal and lumber, and you understand what's causing congestion at Vancouver at any given point in time.
We're saying, “I'm ordering 25 cars for next Thursday and you tell me what you can deliver”. Based on that commitment, we will measure your performance. So the Friday before, when you issue your final service plan and it says that you will get 20 cars on Thursday, we'll hold you accountable for 20 cars--and on Thursday. That's the first measure we'll look at. Of course, there are still 22 pages of things that hold the shipper accountable for doing all kinds of good things that make the railways efficient.
We're saying that they will provide a commitment and we'll measure their performance against it. Second, if they're going to change that plan, and we know that it'll change, we are telling them what the standard is for informing us of that change and, again, what the consequences are for not informing us. Then, once we load and release the cars, we're telling them to provide us with an estimated time of arrival. This notion that we're not going to measure the effectiveness of our ETAs and that the computer logic will be faulty is unacceptable: improve the estimated times of arrival so that our members can plan and operate efficiently and their supply-chain stakeholders can also plan and operate efficiently. These are the types of things--