Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, gentlemen and ladies, for being here this afternoon. It's always good to have farmers and people representing the farming community in front of the ag committee.
I often think about this when I look at the days when I was farming. I can remember the days when we loaded trucks on a Friday and a Saturday, had them go off to North Battleford, only to find out the train didn't show up, and then we'd try to figure out what do we do with 10 or 15 trucks sitting at a grain elevator that's already full. I definitely know what it feels like, and it looks as if it's going on again, even more so.
In the nineties, we made our system more efficient. We got rid of branch lines, got rid of the small town elevators, went to these high-throughput 100-car spots, 125-car spots, to gain efficiencies. In the canola sector, I think we even did more. We went to the next level. We did more processing on the prairies. With the crush plants we've added over the last five years, a substantial amount of volume goes through crush.
I'm curious. When we just look at the movement of grain, I know it's a problem, but when I talk to other people, for example, a plywood plant up on Hudson Bay, they have a problem. They're going down to three days now instead of five days of work. We talked to members of a steel mill in Regina that has given layoff notices because their steel's sitting in the yard instead of going to the customer.
Coming back to the canola oil side of things, what's the oil movement like as far as the crush plants are concerned? Are we going to see some slowdown there because of oil not moving after it's been crushed?