Thank you, Chair.
Thank you for coming. We wish you had not been asked to come here, but with the crisis in grain handling, all the previous witnesses have pointed their fingers at you guys. That's why you're here.
I guess there were some comments made in the last few days about how there was a sense in September that everybody in the industry knew that the crop was going to be big. The other statement we heard, which I was surprised at, was that this is not the first time we've had a big crop like this. It was mentioned that the crop was a similar size in 1994, and movement was better.
I will just give you two or three questions, and both of you can answer them.
My first immediate question is a question most farmers would be asking. Over the next four months, what are you going to do, more than you are doing now—there is talk of 20 million tonnes that could be sitting in farmers' backyards—to move that volume of grain that needs to be moved out of their yards?
My second question is that we are apparently losing a lot of these markets in Asia because of what's happening at Vancouver. The big story said that some of the ships are going down to Seattle. What is the big bottleneck in Vancouver that you can't get these ships loaded on time? Is it because you can't pull the right quantities of a certain grade of grain?
My third question—because farmers are going to lose billions of dollars unless you do something drastic—is about the other commodities. Are they losing the money? Now you're blaming the cold weather and you can't.... Are they losing billions of dollars? I'm talking about potash and oil. Are they losing billions of dollars as the farmers are because of the problems they're having with the system?