Yes. A tremendous opportunity provided by the Canada-Colombia trade agreement for Canadians is that we have a 15% tariff advantage over another major supplier, the United States.
The comment made at the meeting was that the 15% tariff advantage was tempered somewhat by the fact that Canada does not have a reliable transportation system. He was citing his particular experience of having a vessel waiting in Vancouver for 50 days. Anyone in the food business knows that you simply can't have that kind of unexpected delay. If you're to have that delay regularly, you're going to have to take it into account when you make your purchasing decision. I think he was emphasizing that same thing to shippers. And the Coalition of Rail Shippers has emphasized that we have to reduce the variability in our logistics system so that we're giving customers the assurance, when we make a sale, that we're going to deliver it on time.
The challenge we face is that this lack of consistency ultimately ends up costing us in invisible things like vessel demurrage; but also, a lot of things that are less visible, such as risk premiums, also get factored in. We've been told by a steamship line that it is overbooking by 40% just to make sure that its vessel sails full. As an aside, he added a comment: “And believe me, you're paying for that”.
So I think the experience in Colombia says that this is the measure of performance that we need to be driving at: Do we meet customers' needs on a regular basis, and do we do so in a cost-effective way? My conclusion and the conclusion of the Coalition of Rail Shippers would be that we can still make some progress. We have a good system, but we need to make sure that it performs at a high level consistently, quarter after quarter.